PRAGMATISM
A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS
OF THINKING
PRAGMATISM
A NEW NAME FOR SOME
OLD WAYS OF THINKING
POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY BY
WILLIAM JAMES
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1907
COPYRIGHT 1907 tY WILLIAM JAMES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO.
TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN STUART MILL
FROM WHOM I FIRST LEARNED THE
PRAGMATIC OPENNESS OF MIND
AND WHOM MY FANCY LIKES TO PICTURE AS
OUR LEADER
WERE HE ALIVE TO-DAY
PREFACE
THE lectures that follow were, delivered at the
Lowell Institute in Boston in November and
December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at
Columbia University, in New York. They are
printed as delivered, without developments or
notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called -
I do not like the name, but apparently it is too
late to change it — seems to have rather sud-
denly precipitated itself out of the air. A num-
ber of tendencies that have always existed in
philosophy have all at once become conscious
of themselves collectively, and of their com-
bined mission ; and this has occurred in so many
countries, and from so many different points of
view, that much unconcerted statement has
resulted. I have sought to unify the picture
as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in
broad strokes, and avoiding minute contro-
versy. Much futile controversy might have
been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been
willing to wait until we got our message fairly
out.
vii
PREFACE
If my lectures interest any reader in the
general subject, he will doubtless wish to read
farther. I therefore give him a few references.
In America, JOHN DEWEY'S * Studies in
Logical Theory' are the foundation. Read
also by DEWEY the articles in the Philosoph-
ical Review, vol. xv, pp. 113 and 465, in Mind,
vol. xv, p. 293, and in the Journal of Philo-
sophy, vol. iv, p. 197.
Probably the best statements to begin with
however, are F. C. S. SCHILLER'S in his ' Studies
in Humanism,' especially the essays numbered
i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays
and in general the polemic literature of the
subject are fully referred to in his footnotes.
Furthermore3 see J. MILHAUD : le Rationnel,
1898, and the fine articles by LE ROY in the
Revue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also
articles by BLONDEL and DE SAILLY in the
Annales de Philosophic Chretienne, bme Serie,
vols. 2 and 3. PAPINI announces a book on
Pragmatism, in the French language, to be
published very soon.
To avoid one misunderstanding at least,
vni
PREFACE
let me say that there is no logical connexion
between pragmatism, as I understand it, and
a doctrine which I have recently set forth
as 'radical empiricism.' The latter stands on
its own feet. One may entirely reject it and
still be a pragmatist.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, April, 1907.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
THE PRESENT DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY .... 3
Chesterton quoted, 3. Everyone has a philosophy, 4. Tempera-
ment is a factor in all philosophizing, 7. Rationalists and empiricists,
9. The tender-minded and the tough-minded, 12. Most men wish
both facts and religion, 15. Empiricism gives facts without religion,
16. Rationalism gives religion without facts, 17. The layman's
dilemma, 19. The unreality in rationalistic systems, 21. Leibnitz
on the damned, as an example, 23. M. I. Swift on the optimism of
idealists, 27. Pragmatism as a mediating system, 31. An objection,
34. Reply: philosophies have characters like men, and are liable
to as summary judgments, 35. Spencer as an example, 39.
LECTURE II
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS 43 (/
* .•
•The squirrel, 43. Pragmatism as a method, 45. History of the
method, 46. Its character and affinities, 51. How it contrasts with
rationalism and intellectualism, 52. A 'corridor theory,' 54. Prag-
matism as a theory of truth, equivalent to 'humanism,' 55. Earlier
views of mathematical, logical, and natural truth, 56. More recent
views, 57. Schiller's and Dewey's ' instrumental ' view, 58. The
formation of new beliefs, 59. Older truth always has to be kept
account of, 60. Older truth arose similarly, 64. The 'humanistic'
doctrine, 65. Rationalistic criticisms of it, 66. Pragmatism as
mediator between empiricism and religion, 69. Barrenness of
transcendental idealism, 71. How far the concept of the Absolute
must be called true, 73. The true is the good in the way of belief,
75. The clash of truthg, 77. Pragmatism unstiffens discussion, 79.
LECTURE III
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS PRAGMATICALLY CON-
SIDERED 85
The problem of substance, 85. The Eucharist, 88. Berkeley's
pragmatic treatment of material substance, 89. Locke's of per-
xi
CONTENTS
sonal identity, 90. The problem of materialism, 92. Rationalistic
treatment of it, 93. Pragmatic treatment, 96. 'God' is no better
than 'Matter' as a principle, unless he promise more, 100. Prag-
matic comparison of the two principles, 103. The problem of de-
sign, 109. 'Design' per se is barren, 113. The question is what
design, 114. The problem of 'free-will,' 115. Its relations to 'ac-
countability,' 116. Free-will a cosmological theory, 119. The prag-
matic issue at stake in all these problems is what do the alternatives
promise, 122.
LECTURE IV
THE ONE AND THE MANY 127
Total reflection, 127. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality,
130. Rationalistic feeling about unity, 131. Pragmatically consid-
ered, the world is one in many ways, 132. One time and space, 132.
One subject of discourse, 133. Its parts interact, 134. Its oneness
and manyness are co-ordinate, 137. Question of one origin, 138.
Generic oneness, 139. One purpose, 140. One story, 143. One
knower,145. Value of pragmatic method, 148. Absolute monism, 149.
Vivekanda, 152. Various types of union discussed, 156. Conclusion :
We must oppose monistic dogmatism and follow the empirical
findings, 160.
LECTURE V
PRAGMATISM AND COMMON SENSE . ...... 165
Noetic pluralism, 166. How our knowledge grows, 167. Earlier
ways of thinking remain, 169. Prehistoric ancestors discovered the
common sense concepts, 170. List of them, 173. They came grad-
ually into use, 174. Space and time, 177. 'Things,' 178. Kinds,
179. 'Cause' and 'law,' 180. Common sense one stage in mental
evolution, due to geniuses, 180. The 'criticaV stages: 1) scientific
and 2) philosophic, compared with common sense, 185. Impossible
to say which is the more 'true,' 192.
LECTURE VI
PRAGMATISM'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH . y . . . 197
The polemic situation, 197. What does agreement with reality
mean? 198-217. It means verifiability, 201. Verifiability means
xii
CONTENTS
ability to guide us prosperously through experience, 202. Com-
pleted verifications seldom needful, 207. 'Eternal' truths, 209.
Consistency, 210; with language, 213; with previous truths, 214.
Rationalist objections, 218. Truth is a good, like health, wealth,
etc., 220. It is expedient thinking, 222. The past, 223. Truth
grows, 224. Rationalist objections, 226. Reply to them, 229.
LECTURE VII
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 239
The notion of the Truth, 239. Schiller on 'Humanism,' 242.
Three sorts of reality of which any new truth must take account,
244. To 'take account* is ambiguous, 245. Absolutely independent
reality is hard to find, 248. The human contribution is ubiquitous
and builds out the given, 250. Essence of pragmatism's contrast
with rationalism, 257. Rationalism affirms a transempirical world,
259. Motives for this, 260. Tough-mindedness rejects them, 262.
A genuine alternative, 264. Pragmatism mediates, 266.
LECTURE VIII
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 273
Utility of the Absolute, 273. Whitman's poem 'To You,' 274.
Two ways of taking it, 276. My friend's letter, 278. Necessities
venrus possibilities, 282. 'Possibility' defined, 283. Three views
of the world's salvation, 284. Pragmatism is melioristic, 286. We
may create reality, 287. Why should anything be? 288. Supposed
choice before creation, 290. The healthy and the morbid reply, 291.
The 'tender' and the 'tough' types of religion, 293. Pragmatism
mediates, 297.
I
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
LECTURE I
THE PRESENT DILEMMA IN
PHILOSOPHY
IN the preface to that admirable collection of
essays of his called 'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton
writes these words : "There are some people —
and I am one of them — who think that the
most practical and important thing about a
man is still his view of the universe. We think
that for a landlady considering a lodger it is
important to know his income, but still more
important to know his philosophy. We think
that for a general about to fight an enemy it is
important to know the enemy's numbers, but
still more important to know the enemy's phil-
osophy. We think the question is not whether
the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but
whether in the long run anything else affects
them."
I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I
know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a
philosophy, each and all of you, and that the
most interesting and important thing about you
PRAGMATISM
is the way in which it determines the perspect-
ive in your several worlds. You know the same
of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at
the audacity of the enterprise which I am about
to begin. For the philosophy which is so im-
portant in each of us is not a technical matter;
it is our more or less dumb sense of what life
honestly and deeply means. It is only partly
got from books ; it is our individual way of just
seeing and feeling the total push and pressure
of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that
many of you are students of the cosmos in the
classroom sense, yet here *I stand desirous of
interesting you in a philosophy which to no
small extent has to be technically treated. I
wish to fill you with sympathy with a contem-
poraneous tendency in which I profoundly be-
lieve, and yet I have to talk like a professor to
you who are not students. Whatever universe a
professor believes in must at any rate be a uni-
verse that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A
universe definable in two sentences is some-
thing for which the professorial intellect has no
use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
have heard friends and colleagues try to popu-
larize philosophy in this very hall, but they
soon grew dry, and then technical, and the
results were only partially encouraging. So my
enterprise is a bold one. The founder of prag-
matism himself recently gave a course of lec-
tures at the Lowell Institute with that very
word in its title, — flashes of brilliant light
relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None
of us, I fancy, understood all that he said -
yet here I stand, making a very similar ven-
ture.
I risk it because the very lectures I speak of
drew — they brought good audiences. There
is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in
hearing deep things talked about, even though
neither we nor the disputants understand them.
We get the problematic thrill, we feel the pre-
sence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin
in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will
or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and
see how every one in the place pricks up his
ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most
vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments
5
PRAGMATISM
tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and in-
genuity.
Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and
believing also that a kind of new dawn is break-
ing upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per
fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news
of the situation.
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and
the most trivial of human pursuits. It works
in the minutest crannies and it opens out the
widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been
said, but it can inspire our souls with courage;
and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and
challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often
are to common people, no one of us can get
along without the far-flashing beams of light
it sends over the world's perspectives. These
illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects
of darkness and mystery that accompany them,
give to what it says an interest that is much
more than professional.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent
that of a certain clash of human tempera-
ments. Undignified as such a treatment may
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to
take account of this clash and explain a good
many of the divergencies of philosophers by
it. Of whatever temperament a professional
philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing,
to sink the fact of his temperament. Tempera-
ment is no conventionally recognized reason,
so he urges impersonal reasons only for his con-
clusions. Yet his temperament really gives him
a stronger bias than any of his more strictly
objective premises. It loads the evidence for
him one way or the other, making for a more
sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of
the universe, just as this fact or that principle
would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting
a universe that suits it, he believes in any re-
presentation of the universe that does suit it.
He feels men of opposite temper to be out of
key with the world's character, and in his heart
considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in
the philosophic business, even though they
may far excel him in dialectical ability.
Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on
the bare ground of his temperament, to su-
7
PRAGMATISM
perior discernment or authority. There arises
thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic
discussions : the potentest of all our premises is
never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute
to clearness if in these lectures we should break
this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel
free to do so.
Of course I am talking here of very posi-
tively marked men, men of radical idiosyn-
cracy, who have set their stamp and likeness
on philosophy and figure in its history. Plato,
Locke, Hegel, Spencer, are such temperamen-
tal thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no
very definite intellectual temperament, we are
a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one
present very moderately. We hardly know our
own preferences in abstract matters; some of
us are easily talked out of them, and end by
following the fashion or taking up with the be-
liefs of the most impressive philosopher in our
neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the
one thing that has counted so far in philosophy
is that a man should see things, see them straight
in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with
8
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
any opposite way of seeing them. There is no
reason to suppose that this strong tempera-
mental vision is from now onward to count no
longer in the history of man's beliefs.
Now the particular difference of tempera-
ment that I have in mind in making these re-
marks is one that has counted in literature, art,
government, and manners as well as in philo-
sophy. In manners we find formalists and free-
and-easy persons. In government, authorita-
rians and anarchists. In literature, purists or
academicals, and realists. In art, classics and
romantics. You recognize these contrasts as
familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very
similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms
'rationalist' and 'empiricist,' 'empiricist'
meaning your lover of facts in all their crude
variety, 'rationalist' meaning your devotee to
abstract and eternal principles. No one can
live an hour without both facts and principles,
so it is a difference rather of emphasis ; yet it
breeds antipathies of the most pungent charac-
ter between those who lay the emphasis differ-
ently; and we shall find it extraordinarily con-
9
PRAGMATISM
venient to express a certain contrast in men's
ways of taking their universe, by talking of the
'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist' temper.
These terms make the contrast simple and
massive.
More simple and massive than are usually
the men of whom the terms are predicated.
For every sort of permutation and combination
is possible in human nature; and if I now pro-
ceed to define more fully what I have in mind
when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by
adding to each of those titles some secondary
qualifying characteristics, I beg you to regard
my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary.
I select types of combination that nature offers
very frequently, but by no means uniformly,
and I select them solely for their convenience
in helping me to my ulterior purpose of charac-
terizing pragmatism. Historically we find the
terms 'intellectualism5 and 'sensationalism'
used as synonyms of 'rationalism' and 'em-
piricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most
frequently with intellectualism an idealistic
and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the
10
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, ,
and their optimism is apt to be decidedly con-
ditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always
monistic. It starts from wholes and universals,
and makes much of the unity of things. Empir-
icism starts from the parts, and makes of the
whole a collection — is not averse therefore to
calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually
considers itself more religious than empiricism,
but there is much to say about this claim, so I
merely mention it. It is a true claim when the
individual rationalist is what is called a man
of feeling, and when the individual empiricist
prides himself on being hard-headed. In that
case the rationalist will usually also be in favor
of what is called free-will, and the empiricist
will be a fatalist — I use the terms most popu-
larly current. The rationalist finally will be of
dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the
empiricist may be more sceptical and open to
discussion.
I will write these traits down in two columns.
I think you will practically recognize the two
types of mental make-up that I mean if I head
11
PRAGMATISM
the columns by the titles ' tender-minded ' and
' tough-minded ' respectively.
THE TENDER-MINDED. THE TOUGH-MINDED.
Rationalistic (going by Empiricist (going by
' principles ') , * facts ') ,
Intellectualistic, Sensationalistic,
Idealistic, Materialistic,
Optimistic, Pessimistic,
Religious, Irreligious,
Free-willist, Fatalistic,
Monistic, Pluralistic,
Dogmatical. Sceptical.
Pray postpone for a moment the question
whether the two contrasted mixtures which I
have written down are each inwardly coherent
and self-consistent or not — I shall very soon
have a good deal to say on that point. It suf-
fices for our immediate purpose that tender-
minded and tough-minded people, character-
ized as I have written them down, do both exist.
Each of you probably knows some well-marked
example of each type, and you know what each
example thinks of the example on the other side
of the line. They have a low opinion of each
other. Their antagonism, whenever as individ-
uals their temperaments have been intense, has
12
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
formed in all ages a part of the philosophic
atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of
the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough
think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-
heads. The tender feel the tough to be unre-
fined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction
is very much like that that takes place when
Bostonian tourists mingle with a population
like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes
the other to be inferior to itself ; but disdain
in the one case is mingled with amusement, in
the other it has a dash of fear.
Now, as I have already insisted, few of us
are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple,
and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs,
in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering
for the good things on both sides of the line.
Facts are good, of course — give us lots of
facts. Principles are good — give us plenty of
principles. The world is indubitably one if you
look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it
many, if you look at it in another. It is both one
and many — let us adopt a sort of pluralistic
monism. Everything of course is necessarily
13
PRAGMATISM
determined, and yet of course our wills are free:
a sort of free-will determinism is the true philo-
sophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable, but
the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism
may be combined with metaphysical optimism.
And so forth — your ordinary philosophic
layman never being a radical, never straight-
ening out his system, but living vaguely in one
plausible compartment of it or another to suit
the temptations of successive hours.
But some of us are more than mere laymen
in philosophy. We are worthy of the name of
amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much
inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We
cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience
so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from
opposite sides of the line.
And now I come to the first positively im-
portant point which I wish to make. Never
were as many men of a decidedly empiricist
proclivity in existence as there are at the pre-
sent day. Our children, one may say, are al-
most born scientific. But our esteem for facts
has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is
14
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is
devout. Now take a man of this type, and let
him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling
to mix a hodge-podge -system after the fashion
of a common layman, and what does he find his
situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord
1906? He wants facts; he wants science;
but he also wants a religion. And being an
amateur and not an independent originator in
philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to
the experts and professionals whom he finds
already in the field. A very large number of
you here present, possibly a majority of you,
are amateurs of just this sort.
Now what kinds of philosophy do you find
actually offered to meet your need ? You find
an empirical philosophy that is not religious
enough, and a religious philosophy that is not
empirical enough for your purpose. If you look
to the quarter where facts are most considered
you find the whole tough-minded program in
operation, and the * conflict between science
and religion' in full blast. Either it is that
Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his
15
PRAGMATISM
materialistic monism, his ether-god and his
jest at your God as a * gaseous vertebrate'; or
it is Spencer treating the world's history as
a redistribution of matter and motion solely,
and bowing religion politely out at the front
door: — she may indeed continue to exist, but
she must never show her face inside the temple.
For a hundred and fifty years past the pro-
gress of science has seemed to mean the enlarge-
ment of the material universe and the diminu-
tion of man's importance. The result is what
one may call the growth of naturalistic or posi-
tivistic feeling. Man is no lawgiver to nature,
he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm;
he it is who must accommodate himself. Let
him record truth, inhuman though it be,4 and
submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and
courage are gone, the vision is materialistic
and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-
products of physiology; what is higher' is
explained by what is lower and treated for-
ever as a case of 'nothing but' — nothing but
something else of a quite inferior sort. You
get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which
16
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
only the tough-minded find themselves con-
genially at home.
If now, on the other hand, you turn to the
religious quarter for consolation, and take
counsel of the tender-minded philosophies,
what do you find?
Religious philosophy in our day and gener-
ation is, among us English-reading people, of
two main types. One of these is more radical
and aggressive, the other has more the air of
fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical
wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-
called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-
Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men
as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce.
This philosophy has greatly influenced the more
studious members of our protestant ministry.
It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has al-
ready blunted the edge of the traditional theism
in protestantism at large.
That theism remains, however. It is the
lineal descendant, through one stage of conces-
sion after another, of the dogmatic scholastic
theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries
17
PRAGMATISM
of the catholic church. For a long time it used
to be called among us the philosophy of the
Scottish school. It is what I meant by the
philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow
retreat. Between the encroachments of the
hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Abso-
lute,' on the one hand, and those of the scienti-
fic evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the
men that give us this kind of a philosophy,
James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor
Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather
tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as
you like, this philosophy is not radical in tem-
per. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that
seeks a modus Vivendi above all things. It ac-
cepts the facts of Darwinism, the facts of cere-
bral physiology, but it does nothing active or
enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious
and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in con-
sequence; whereas absolutism has a certain
prestige due to the more radical style of it.
These two systems are what you have to
choose between if you turn to the tender-minded
school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have
18
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
supposed you to be, you find the trail of the
serpent of rationalism, of intellectualism, over
everything that lies on that side of the line.
You escape indeed the materialism that goes
with the reigning empiricism; but you pay for
your escape by losing contact with the concrete
parts of life. The more absolutistic philo-
sophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction
that they never even try to come down. The
absolute mind which they offer us, the mind
that makes our universe by thinking it, might,
for aught they show us to the contrary, have
made any one of a million other universes just
as well as this. You can deduce no single act-
ual particular from the notion of it. It is com-
patible with any state of things whatever being
true here below. And the theistic God is almost
as sterile a principle. You have to go to the
world which he has created to get any inkling
of his actual character: he is the kind of god
that has once for all made that kind of a world.
The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely
abstract heights as does the Absolute. Abso-
lutism has a certain sweep and dash about it,
19
PRAGMATISM
while the usual theism is more insipid, but both
are equally remote and vacuous. What you
want is a philosophy that will not only exercise
your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that
will make some positive connexion with this
actual world of finite human lives.
You want a system that will combine both
things, the scientific loyalty to facts and will-
ingness to take account of them, the spirit of
adaptation and accommodation, in short, but
also the old confidence in human values and
the resultant spontaneity, whether of the relig-
ious or of the romantic type. And this is then
your dilemma : you find the two parts of your
quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find em-
piricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or
else you find a rationalistic philosophy that
indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps
out of all definite touch with concrete facts
and joys and sorrows.
I am not sure how many of you live close
enough to philosophy to realize fully what I
mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a lit-
tle longer on that unreality in all rationalistic
20
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
systems by which your serious believer in facts
is so apt to feel repelled.
I wish that I had saved the first couple of
pages of a thesis which a student handed me
a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so
clearly that I am sorry I can not read them to
you now. This young man, who was a gradu-
ate of some Western college, began by saying
that he had always taken for granted that when
you entered a philosophic classroom you had to
open relations with a universe entirely distinct
from the one you left behind you in the street.
The two were supposed, he said, to have so
little to do with each other, that you could
not possibly occupy your mind with them at
the same time. The world of concrete personal
experiences to which the street belongs is multi-
tudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy,
painful and perplexed. The world to which
your philosophy-professor introduces you is
simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of
real life are absent from it. Its architecture is
classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines,
logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and
PRAGMATISM
dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind
of marble temple shining on a hill.
In point of fact it is far less an account of this
actual world than a clear addition built upon
it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist
fancy may take refuge from the intolerably con-
fused and gothic character which mere facts
present. It is no explanation of our concrete
universe, it is another thing altogether, a sub-
stitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.
Its temperament, if I may use the word tem-
perament here, is utterly alien to the temper-
ament of existence in the concrete. Refinement
is what characterizes our intellectualist philo-
sophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving
for a refined object of contemplation which is
so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask
you in all seriousness to look abroad on this
colossal universe of concrete facts, on their
awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruel-
ties, on the wildness which they show, and then
to tell me whether * refined' is the one inevit-
able descriptive adjective that springs to your
lips.
22
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
Refinement has its place in things, true
enough. But a philosophy that breathes out
nothing but refinement will never satisfy the
empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather
a monument of artificiality. So we find men of
science preferring to turn their backs on meta-
physics as on something altogether cloistered
and spectral, and practical men shaking phil-
osophy's dust off their feet and following the
call of the wild.
Truly there is something a little ghastly in
the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal
system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was
a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest
in facts than most rationalist minds can show.
Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate,
you have only to read that charmingly writ-
ten * Theodicee ' of his, in which he sought to
justify the ways of God to man, and to prove
that the world we live in is the best of possible
worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I
mean.
Among other obstacles to his optimistic
philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz to consider the
23
PRAGMATISM
number of the eternally damned. That it is
infinitely greater, in our human case, than that
of those saved, he assumes as a premise from
the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in
this way. Even then, he says :
"The evil will appear as almost nothing in
comparison with the good, if we once consider
the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius
Secundus Curio has written a little book, <De
Amplitudine Regni Coelestis,' which was re-
printed not long ago. But he failed to compass
the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. The
ancients had small ideas of the works of God.
... It seemed to them that only our earth
had inhabitants, and even the notion of our an-
tipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world
for them consisted of some shining globes and
a few crystalline spheres. But to-day, whatever
be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the
Universe we must recognize in it a countless
number of globes, as big as ours or bigger,
which have just as much right as it has to
support rational inhabitants, tho it does not
follow that these need all be men. Our earth is
24
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
only one among the six principal satellites of
our sun. As all the fixed stars are suns, one sees
how small a place among visible things our
earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one
among them. Now all these suns maybe inha-
bited by none but happy creatures ; and nothing
obliges us to believe that the number of damned
persons is very great; for a very few instances
and samples suffice for the utility which good
draws from evil. Moreover, since there is no
reason to suppose that there are stars every-
where, may there not be a great space beyond
the region of the stars? And this immense
space, surrounding all this region, . . . may
be replete with happiness and glory. . . .
What now becomes of the consideration of our
Earth and of its denizens ? Does it not dwindle
to something incomparably less than a physical
point, since our Earth is but a point compared
with the distance of the fixed stars. Thus the
part of the Universe which we know, being
almost lost in nothingness compared with that
which is unknown to us, but which we are yet
obliged to admit; and all the evils that we
25
PRAGMATISM
know lying in this almost-nothing; it follows
that the evils may be almost-nothing in com-
parison with the goods that the Universe con-
tains."
Leibnitz continues elsewhere:
" There is a kind of justice which aims
neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor
at furnishing an example to others, nor at the
reparation of the injury. This justice is founded
in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfac-
tion in the expiation of a wicked deed. The
Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive
justice, which is properly vindictive justice, and
which God has reserved for himself at many
junctures. ... It is always founded in the
fitness of things, and satisfies not only the
offended party, but all wise lookers-on, even as
beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture
satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that
the torments of the damned continue, even tho
they serve no longer to turn any one away from
sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue,
even tho they confirm no one in good ways.
The damned draw to themselves ever new
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
penalties by their continuing sins, and the
blest attract ever fresh joys by their unceasing
progress in good. Both facts are founded on
the principle of fitness, . . . for God has made
all things harmonious in perfection as I have
already said."
Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvi-
ous to need comment from me. It is evident
that no realistic image of the experience of a
damned soul had ever approached the portals
of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that
the smaller is the number of ' samples ' of the
genus 'lost-soul' whom God throws as a sop
to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably
grounded is the glory of the blest. What he
gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheer-
ful substance even hell-fire does not warm.
And do not tell me that to show the shallow-
ness of rationalist philosophizing I have had
to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The opti-
mism of present-day rationalism sounds just
as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual
universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism
makes systems, and systems must be closed.
27
PRAGMATISM
For men in practical life perfection is something
far off and still in process of achievement. This
for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite
and relative: the absolute ground of things is
a perfection eternally complete.
I find a fine example of revolt against the airy
and shallow optimism of current religious phil-
osophy in a publication of that valiant an-
archistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's
anarchism goes a little farther than mine does,
but I confess that I sympathize a good deal,
and some of you, I know, will sympathize
heartily with his dissatisfaction with the ideal-
istic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his
pamphlet on * Human Submission' with a series
of city reporter's items from newspapers (sui-
cides, deaths from starvation, and the like)
as specimens of our civilized regime. For
instance :
"After trudging through the snow from one
end of the city to the other in the vain hope of
securing employment, and with his wife and
six children without food and ordered to leave
their home in an upper east-side tenement-
28
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
house because of non-payment of rent, John
Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by
drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his po-
sition three weeks ago through illness, and
during the period of idleness his scanty savings
disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work
with a gang of city snow-shovelers, but he was
too weak from illness, and was forced to quit
after an hour's trial with the shovel. Then
the weary task of looking for employment was
again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged,
Corcoran returned to his home last night to
find his wife and children without food and
the notice of dispossession on the door. On
the following morning he drank the poison.
"The records of many more such cases lie
before me [Mr. Swift goes on] ; an encyclopedia
might easily be filled with their kind. These
few I cite as an interpretation of the Universe.
* We are aware of the presence of God in his
world,' says a writer in a recent English review.
[The very presence of ill in the temporal order
is the condition of the perfection of the eternal
order, writes Professor Royce (The World and
29
PRAGMATISM
the Individual, n, 385).] 'The Absolute is the
richer for every discord and for all the diversity
which it embraces,' says F. H. Bradley (Ap-
pearance and Reality, 204). He means that
these slain men make the universe richer, and
that is philosophy. But while Professors Royce
and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thor-
oughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the
Absolute and explaining away evil and pain,
this is the condition of the only beings known to
us anywhere in the universe with a developed
consciousness of what the universe is. What
these people experience is Reality. It gives us
an absolute phase of the universe. It is the per-
sonal experience of those best qualified in our
circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us
what is. Now what does thinking about the ex-
perience of these persons come to, compared to
directly and personally feeling it as they feel it ?
The philosophers are dealing in shades, while
those who live and feel know truth. And the
mind of mankind — not yet the mind of phil-
osophers and of the proprietary class — but of
the great mass of the silently thinking men and
30
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
feeling men, is coming to this view. They are
judging the universe as they have hitherto per-
mitted the hierophants of religion and learning
to judge them. . . .
" This Cleveland workingman, killing his
children and himself [another of the cited cases]
is one of the elemental stupendous facts of this
modern world and of this universe. It cannot
be glozed over or minimized away by all the
treatises on God, and Love, and Being, help-
lessly existing in their monumental vacuity.
This is one of the simple irreducible elements
of this world's life, after millions of years of
opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It
is in the mental world what atoms or sub-atoms
are in the physical, primary, indestructible.
And what it blazons to man is the imposture of
all philosophy which does not see in such events
the consummate factor of all conscious ex-
perience. These facts invincibly prove religion
a nullity. Man will, not give religion two thou-
sand centuries or twenty centuries more to try
itself and waste human time. Its time is up;
its probation is ended; its own record ends it.
31
PRAGMATISM
Mankind has not aeons and eternities to spare
for trying out discredited systems."1
Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind
upon the rationalist bill of fare. It is an abso-
lute 'No, I thank you.' 'Religion,' says Mr.
Swift, 'is like a sleep-walker to whom actual
things are blank.' And such, tho possibly less
tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of
every seriously inquiring amateur in philo-
sophy to-day who turns to the philosophy-pro-
fessors for the wherewithal to satisfy the ful-
ness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers
give him a materialism, rationalists give him
something religious, but to that religion 'actual
things are blank.' He becomes thus the judge
of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he finds
us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts
disdainfully, for after all, his is the typically
perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose de-
mands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms
and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run.
It is at this point that my own solution begins
1 Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia,
Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10.
32
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing prag-
matism as a philosophy that can satisfy both
kinds of demand. It can remain religious like
the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the
empiricisms, it can preserve the richest inti-
macy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave
many of you with as favorable an opinion of it
as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end
of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism
bodily now. I will begin with it on the stroke
of the clock next time. I prefer at the present
moment to return a little on what I have said.
If any of you here are professional philo-
sophers, and some of you I know to be such,
you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far
to have been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in
an almost incredible degree. Tender-minded
and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction!
And, in general, when philosophy is all com-
pacted of delicate intellectualities and subtle-
ties and scrupulosities, and when every possible
sort of combination and transition obtains
within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and
reduction of highest things to the lowest possi-
33
PRAGMATISM
ble expression is it to represent its field of con-
flict as a sort of rough-and-tumble fight between
two hostile temperaments! What a childishly
external view! And again, how stupid it is to
treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as
a crime, and to damn them because they offer
themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape,
rather than as prolongations of the world of
facts. Are not all our theories just remedies
and places of escape ? And, if philosophy is to
be religious, how can she be anything else than
a place of escape from the crassness of reality's
surface? What better thing can she do than
raise us out of our animal senses and show us
another and a nobler home for our minds in
that great framework of ideal principles sub-
tending all reality, which the intellect divines ?
How can principles and general views ever be
anything but abstract outlines ? Was Cologne
cathedral built without an architect's plan on
paper ? Is refinement in itself an abomination ?
Is concrete rudeness the only thing that's
true?
Believe me, I feel the full force of the indict-
34
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
ment. The picture I have given is indeed mon-
strously over-simplified and rude. But like all
abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If
philosophers can treat the life of the universe
abstractly, they must not complain of an ab-
stract treatment of the life of philosophy itself.
In point of fact the picture I have given is, how-
ever coarse and sketchy, literally true. Tem-
peraments with their cravings and refusals do
determine men in their philosophies, and always
will. The details of systems may be reasoned
out piecemeal, and when the student is work-
ing at a system, he may often forget the for-
est for the single tree. But when the labor is
accomplished, the mind always performs its
big summarizing act, and the system forthwith
stands over against one like a living thing, with
that strange simple note of individuality which
haunts our memory, like the wraith of the man,
when a friend or enemy of ours is dead.
Not only Walt Whitman could write 'who
touches this book touches a man.' The books
of all the great philosophers are like so many
men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor
35
PRAGMATISM
in each one of them, typical but indescribable,
is the finest fruit of our own accomplished phil-
osophic education. What the system pretends
to be is a picture of the great universe of God.
What it is, — and oh so flagrantly! — is the
revelation of how intensely odd the personal
flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced
to these terms (and all our philosophies get re-
duced to them in minds made critical by learn-
ing) our commerce with the systems reverts to
the informal, to the instinctive human reaction
of satisfaction or dislike. We grow .as peremp-
tory in our rejection or admission, as when a
person presents himself as a candidate for our
favor; our verdicts are couched in as simple
adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure
the total character of the universe as we feel it,
against the flavor of the philosophy proffered
us, and one word is enough.
'Statt der lebendigen Natur,' we say, 'da
Gott die Menschen schuf hinein,' — that nebu-
lous concoction, that wooden, that straight-
laced thing, that crabbed artificiality, that
musty schoolroom product, that sick man's
36
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
dream! Away with it. Away with all of them!
Impossible ! Impossible !
Our work over the details of his system is
indeed what gives us our resultant impression
of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant
impression itself that we react. Expertness in
philosophy is measured by the defmiteness of
our summarizing reactions, by the immediate
perceptive epithet with which the expert hits
such complex objects off. But great expertness
is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few
people have definitely articulated philosophies
of their own. But almost every one has his own
peculiar sense of a certain total character in the
universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match
it of the peculiar systems that he knows. They
don't just cover his world. One will be too
dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much
of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and
a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he
and we know off-hand that such philosophies
are out of plumb and out of key and out of
'whack,' and have no business to speak up in
the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza,
37
PRAGMATISM
Mill, Caird, Hegel — I prudently avoid names
nearer home ! — I am sure that to many of you,
my hearers, these names are little more than
reminders of as many curious personal ways of
falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity
if such ways of taking the universe were act-
ually true.
We philosophers have to reckon with such
feelings on your part. In the last resort, I re-
peat, it will be by them that all our philosophies
shall ultimately be judged. The finally victori-
ous way of looking at things will be the most
completely impressive way to the normal run of
minds.
One word more — namely about philosophies
necessarily being abstract outlines. There are
outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings
that are fat, conceived in the cube by their
planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat
on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass.
These remain skinny and emaciated even when
set up in stone and mortar, and the outline
already suggests that result. An outline in it-
self is meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily
38
THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
suggest a meagre thing. It is the essential mea-
greness of what is suggested by the usual ration-
alistic philosophies that moves empiricists to
their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert
Spencer's system is much to the point here.
Rationalists feel his fearful array of insuffi-
ciencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament,
the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his prefer-
ence for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack
of education even in mechanical principles, and
in general the vagueness of all his fundamental
ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked
together out of cracked hemlock boards — and
yet the half of England wants to bury him in
Westminster Abbey.
Why? Why does Spencer call out so much
reverence in spite of his weakness in rational-
istic eyes ? Why should so many educated men
who feel that weakness, you and I perhaps,
wish to see him in the Abbey notwithstanding ?
Simply because we feel his heart to be in the
right place philosophically. His principles may
be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books
try to mould themselves upon the particular
PRAGMATISM
shape of this particular world's carcase. The
noise of facts resounds through all his chapters,
the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes
facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and
that is enough. It means the right kind of thing
for the empiricist mind.
The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope
to begin talking in my next lecture preserves
as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike
Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends
by turning positive religious constructions out
of doors — it treats them cordiallyas well.
I hope I may lead you to find it just the medi-
ating way of thinking that you require.
II
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
LECTURE II
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
SOME years ago, being with a camping party
in the mountains, I returned from a solitary
ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious
metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dis-
pute was a squirrel — a live squirrel supposed
to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while
over against the tree's opposite side a human
being was imagined to stand. This human wit-
ness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving
rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast
he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the op-
posite direction, and always keeps the tree
between himself and the man, so that never
a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant meta-
physical problem now is this : Does the man go
round the squirrel or not ? He goes round the
tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the
tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the
unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion
had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken
sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on
43
PRAGMATISM
both sides were even. Each side, when I ap-
peared therefore appealed to me to make it a
majority. Miridful of the scholastic adage that
whenever you meet a contradiction you must
make a distinction, I immediately sought and
found one, as follows: "Which party is right,"
I said, "depends on what you practically mean
by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean
passing from the north of him to the east, then
to the south, then to the west, and then to the
north of him again, obviously the man does go
round him, for he occupies these successive po-
sitions. But if on the contrary you mean being
first in front of him, then on the right of him,
then behind him, then on his left, and finally in
front again, it is quite as obvious that the man
fails to go round him, for by the compensating
movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his
belly turned towards the man all the time, and
his back turned away. Make the distinction,
and there is no occasion for any farther dispute.
You are both right and both wrong according
as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one
practical fashion or the other."
44
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
Although one or two of the hotter disputants
called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying
they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-
splitting, but meant just plain honest English
'round,' the majority seemed to think that the
distinction had assuaged the dispute.
I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a pe-
culiarly simple example of what I wish now to
speak of as the pragmatic method. The prag-
matic method is primarily a method of settling
metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be
interminable. Is the world one or many ? -
fated or free ? — material or spiritual ? — here
are notions either of which may or may not hold
good of the world ; and disputes over such no-
tions are unending. The pragmatic method in
such cases is to try to interpret each notion by
tracing its respective practical consequences.
What difference would it practically make to
any one if this notion rather than that notion
were true ? If no practical difference whatever
can be traced, then. the alternatives mean prac-
tically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be
45
PRAGMATISM
able to show some practical difference that
must follow from one side or the other's being
right.
A glance at the history of the idea will show
you still better what pragmatism means. The
term is derived from the same Greek word
77/oayfta, meaning action, from which our words
'practice' and 'practical' come. It was first
introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles
Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to
Make Our Ideas Clear,' in the 'Popular Sci-
ence Monthly' for January of that year 1 Mr.
Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are
really rules for action, said that, to develop
a thought's meaning, we need only determine
what conduct it is fitted to produce : that con-
duct is for us its sole significance. And the
tangible fact at the root of all our thought-
distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no
one of them so fine as to consist in anything but
a possible difference of practice. To attain
perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object,
then, we need only consider what conceivable
1 Translated in the Revue Phttosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).
46
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
effects of a practical kind the object may in-
volve— what sensations we are to expect from
it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our
conception of these effects, whether immediate
or remote, is then for us the whole of our con-
ception of the object, so far as that conception
has positive significance at all.
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle
of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by
any one for twenty years, until I, in an ad-
dress before Professor Howison's philosophical
union at the university of California, brought it
forward again and made a special application
of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times
seemed ripe for its reception. The word 'prag-
matism' spread, and at present it fairly spots
the pages of the philosophic journals. On
all hands we find the * pragmatic movement'
spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes
with contumely, seldom with clear understand-
ing. It is evident that the term applies itself
conveniently to a number of tendencies that
hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that
it has ' come to stay.'
47
PRAGMATISM
To take in the importance of Peirce's princi-
ple, one must get accustomed to applying it to
concrete cases. I found a few years ago that
Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had
been making perfectly distinct use of the prin-
ciple of pragmatism in his lectures on the
philosophy of science, though he had not called
it by that name.
"All realities influence our practice," he
wrote me, "and that influence is their meaning
for us. I am accustomed to put questions to
my classes in this way : In what respects would
the world be different if this alternative or that
were true ? If I can find nothing that would
become different, then the alternative has no
sense."
That is, the rival views mean practically the
same thing, and meaning, other than practical,
there is for us none. Ostwald in a published
lecture gives this example of what he means.
Chemists have long wrangled over the inner
constitution of certain bodies called ' tautomer-
ous.' Their properties seemed equally consist-
ent with the notion that an instable hydrogen
48
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are
instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy
raged, but never was decided. " It would never
have begun," says Ostwald, "if the combatants
had asked themselves what particular experi-
mental fact could have been made different by
one or the other view being correct. For it
would then have appeared that no difference of
fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was
as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times
about the raising of dough by yeast, one party
should have invoked a 'brownie,' while an-
other insisted on an 'elf as the true cause of
the phenomenon." *
It is astonishing to see how many philosoph-
ical disputes collapse into insignificance the
moment you subject them to this simple test of
tracing a concrete consequence. There can be
1 "Theorie und Praxis,' Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u.
Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical prag-
matism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin:
"I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets it,
is that it is 'the science of masses, molecules, and the ether.' And
I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly
get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of
bodies and pushing them!" (Science, January 2, 1903.)
49
PRAGMATISM
no difference anywhere that does n't make a
difference elsewhere — no difference in abstract
truth that does n't express itself in a difference
in concrete fact and in conduct consequent
upon that fact, imposed on somebody, some-
how, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole
function of philosophy ought to be to find
out what definite difference it will make to you
and me, at definite instants of our life, if this
world-formula or that world-formula be the
true one.
There is absolutely nothing new in the prag-
matic method. Socrates was an adept at it.
Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berke-
ley, and Hume made momentous contribu-
tions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodg-
son keeps insisting that realities are only what
they are 'known as.' But these forerunners of
pragmatism used it in fragments: they were
a prelude only. Not until in our time has it gen-
eralized itself, become conscious of a universal
mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I
believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end
by inspiring you with my belief.
50
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar
attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude,
but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in
a more radical and in a less objectionable
form than it has ever yet assumed. A prag-
matist turns his back resolutely and once for
all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to pro-
fessional philosophers. He turns away from
abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solu-
tions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed
principles, closed systems, and pretended abso-
lutes and origins. He turns towards concrete-
ness and adequacy, towards facts, towards act-
ion and towards power. That means the em-
piricist temper regnant and the rationalist
temper sincerely given up. It means the open
air and possibilities of nature, as against
dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality
in truth.
At the same time it does not stand for any
special results. It is a method only. But the
general triumph of that method would mean
an enormous change in what I called in my
last lecture the ' temperament' of philosophy.
51
PRAGMATISM
Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type woul
be frozen out, much as the courtier type is
frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane
type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands.
Science and metaphysics would come much
nearer together, would in fact work absolutely
hand in hand.
Metaphysics has usually followed a very
primitive kind of quest. You know how men
have always hankered after unlawful magic,
and you know what a great part in magic words
have always played. If you have his name, or
the formula of incantation that binds him, you
can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever
the power may be. Solomon knew the names of
all the spirits, and having their names, he held
them subject to his will. So the universe has al-
ways appeared to the natural mind as a kind of
enigma, of which the key must be sought in the
shape of some illuminating or power-bringing
word or name. That word names the universe's
principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to
possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,'
* Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so
52
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
nany solving names. You can rest when you
have them. You are at the end of your meta-
physical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you
cannot look on any such word as closing your
quest. You must bring out of each word its
practical cash-value, set it at work within the
stream of your experience. It appears less as
a solution, then, than as a program for more
work, and more particularly as an indication
of the ways in which existing realities may be
changed.
Theories thus become instruments, not an-
swers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We
don't lie back upon them, we move forward,
and, on occasion, make nature over again
by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our
theories, Climbers them up and sets each one
at work. Being nothing essentially new, it har-
monizes with many ancient philosophic tenden-
cies. It agrees with nominalism for instance,
in always appealing to particulars; with util-
itarianism in emphasizing practical aspects;
with positivism in its disdain for verbal
53
PRAGMATISM
solutions, useless questions and metaphysical
abstractions.
All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tend-
encies. Against rationalism as a pretension and .
a method pragmatism is fully armed and mili-
tant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for
no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no
doctrines save its method. As the young Italian
pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the
midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel.
Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one
you may find a man writing an atheistic vol-
ume; in the next some one on his knees pray-
ing for faith and strength; in a third a chemist
investigating a body's properties. In a fourth
a system of idealistic metaphysics is being ex-
cogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of meta-
physics is being shown. But they all own the
corridor, and all must pass through it if they
want a practicable way of getting into or out
of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an
attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic
method means. The attitude of looking away
54
J
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
from first things, principles, 'categories,9 sup-
posed necessities; and of looking towards last
things, fruits, consequences, facts.
So much for tne pragmatic method! You
may say that I have been praising it rather than
explaining it to you, but I shall presently ex-
plain it abundantly enough by showing how it
works on some familiar problems. Meanwhile
the word pragmatism has come to be used in
a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain
theory of truth. I mean to give a whole lecture
to the statement of that theory, after first pav-
ing the way, so I can be very brief now. But
brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your re-
doubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If
much remains obscure,! hope to make it clearer
in the later lectures.
One of the most successfully cultivated
branches of philosophy in our time is what is
called inductive logic, the study of the condi-
tions under which our sciences have evolved.
Writers on this subject have begun to show
a singular unanimity as to what the laws of
nature and elements of fact mean, when f ormu-
55
PRAGMATISM
lated by mathematicians, physicists and chem-
ists. When the first mathematical, logical, and
natural uniformities, the first laws, were dis-
covered, men were so carried away by the clear-
ness, beauty and simplification that resulted,
that they believed themselves to have deci-
phered authentically the eternal thoughts of
the Almighty. His mind also thundered and
reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in
conic sections, squares and roots and ratios,
and geometrized like Euclid. He made Kep-
ler's laws for the planets to follow; he made
velocity increase proportionally to the time in
falling bodies; he made the law of the sines
for light to obey when refracted; he established
the classes, orders, families and genera of
plants and animals, and fixed the distances be-
tween them. He thought the archetypes of all
things, and devised their variations; and when
we rediscover any one of these his wondrous
institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal
intention.
But as the sciences have developed farther,
the notion has gained ground that most, per-
56
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
haps all, of our laws are only approximations.
The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so
numerous that there is no counting them ; and
so many rival formulations are proposed in all
the branches of science that investigators have
become accustomed to the notion that no
theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but
that any one of them may from some point of
view be useful. Their great use is to summarize
old facts and to lead to new ones. They are
only a man-made language, a conceptual short-
hand, as some one calls them, in which we write
our reports of nature; and languages, as is well
known, tolerate much choice of expression and
many dialects.
Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine
necessity from scientific logic. If I mention the
names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson,
Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Heymans, those
of you who are students will easily identify the
tendency I speak of, and will think of addi-
tional names.
Riding now on the front of this wave of sci-
entific logic Messrs. Schiller and Dewey appear
57
PRAGMATISM
with their pragmatistic account of what truth
everywhere signifies. Everywhere, these teach-
ers say, * truth' in our ideas and beliefs means
the same thing that it means in science. It
means, they say, nothing but this, that ideas
(which themselves are but parts of our experi-
ence} become true just in so far as they help us
to get into satisfactory relation with other parts
of our experience, to summarize them and get
about among them by conceptual short-cuts
instead of following the interminable succes-
sion of particular phenomena. Any idea upon
which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that
will carry us prosperously from any one part of
our experience to any other part, linking things
satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
saving labor; is true for just so much, true in
so far forth, true instrumentally. This is the
'instrumental' view of truth taught so suc-
cessfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our
ideas means their power to 'work,' promul-
gated so brilliantly at Oxford.
Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in
reaching this general conception of all truth,
58
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
have only followed the example of geologists,
biologists and philologists. In the establish-
ment of these other sciences, the successful
stroke was always to take some simple process
actually observable in operation — as denuda-
tion by weather, say, or variation from parental
type, or change of dialect by incorporation of
new words and pronunciations — and then to
generalize it, making it apply to all times, and
produce great results by summating its effects
through the ages.
The observable process which Schiller and
Dewey particularly singled out for generaliza-
tion is the familiar one by which any individual
settles into new opinions. The process here is
always the same. The individual has a stock of
old opinions already, but he meets a new expe-
rience that puts them to a strain. Somebody
contradicts them ; or in a reflective moment he
discovers that they contradict each other; or
he hears of facts with which they are incompat-
ible ; or desires arise in him which they cease
to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to
which his mind till then had been a stranger,
59
PRAGMATISM
and from which he seeks to escape by modify-
ing his previous mass of opinions. He saves as
much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief
we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to
change first this opinion, and then that (for they
resist change very variously), until at last some
new idea comes up which he can graft upon the
ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance
of the latter, some idea that mediates between
the stock and the new experience and runs
them into one another most felicitously and
expediently.
This new idea is then adopted as the true
one. It preserves the older stock of truths with
a minimum of modification, stretching them
just enough to make them admit the novelty,
but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the
case leaves possible. An outree explanation,
violating all our preconceptions, would never
pass for a true account of a novelty. We should
scratch round industriously till we found some-
thing less excentric. The most violent revolu-
tions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his
old order standing. Time and space, cause and
60
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
effect, nature and history, and one's own bio-
graphyremain untouched. New truth is always
a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions.
It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever
to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of con-
tinuity. We hold a theory true just in propor-
tion to its success in solving this * problem of
maxima and minima.' But success in solving
this problem is eminently a matter of approx-
imation. We say this theory solves it on the
whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but
that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and
individuals will emphasize their points of satis-
faction differently. To a certain degree, there-
fore, everything here is plastic.
The point I now urge you to observe partic-
ularly is the part played by the older truths.
Failure to take account of it is the source of
much of the unjust criticism levelled against
pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely con-
trolling. Loyalty to them is the first principle
— in most cases it is the only principle; for by
far the most usual way of handling phenomena
so novel that they would make for a serious re-
61
PRAGMATISM
arrangement of our preconception is to ignore
them altogether, or to abuse those who bear
witness for them.
You doubtless wish examples of this process
of truth's growth, and the only trouble is their
superabundance. The simplest case of new
truth is of course the mere numerical addition
of new kinds of facts, or of new single facts of
old kinds, to our experience — an addition that
involves no alteration in the old beliefs. Day
follows day, and its contents are simply added.
The new contents themselves are not true, they
simply come and are. Truth is what we say
about them, and when we say that they have
come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive
formula.
But often the day's contents oblige a re-
arrangement. If I should now utter piercing
shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform,
it would make many of you revise your ideas as
to the probable worth of my philosophy. 'Ra-
dium' came the other day as part of the day's
content, and seemed for a moment to contra-
dict our ideas of the whole order of nature, that
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
order having come to be identified with what is
called the conservation of energy. The mere
sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely
out of its own pocket seemed to violate that
conservation. What to think? If the radia-
tions from it were nothing but an escape of
unsuspected 'potential' energy, pre-existent in-
side of the atoms, the principle of conservation
would be saved. The discovery of * helium' as
the radiation's outcome, opened a way to this
belief. So Ramsay's view is generally held to
be true, because, although it extends our old
ideas of energy, it causes a minimum of altera-
tion in their nature.
I need not multiply instances. A new opin-
ion counts as 'true' just in proportion as it
gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the
novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It
must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact;
and its success (as I said a moment ago) in do-
ing this, is a matter for the individual's appre-
ciation. When old truth grows, then, by new
truth's addition, it is for subjective reasons. We
are in the process and obey the reasons. That
63
PRAGMATISM
new idea is truest which performs most felic-
itously its function of satisfying our double
urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed
as true, by the way it works ; grafting itself then
upon the ancient body of truth, which thus
grows much as a tree grows by the activity of
a new layer of cambium.
Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to general-
ize this observation and to apply it to the most
ancient parts of truth. They also once were
plastic. They also were called true for human
reasons. They also mediated between still
earlier truths and what in those days were novel
observations. Purely objective truth, truth in
whose establishment the function of giving
human satisfaction in marrying previous parts
of experience with newer parts played no role
whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons
why we call things true is the reason why they
are true, for 'to be true' means only to perform
this marriage-function.
The trail of the human serpent is thus over
everything. Truth independent; truth that we
-find merely; truth no longer malleable to hu-
64
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
man need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such
truth exists indeed superabundantly — or is
supposed to exist by rationalistically minded
thinkers ; but then it means only the dead heart
of the living tree, and its being there means
only that truth also has its paleontology, and its
' prescription,' and may grow stiff with years of
veteran service and petrified in men's regard by
sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the old-
est truths nevertheless really are has been viv-
idly shown in our day by the transformation of
logical and mathematical ideas, a transforma-
tion which seems even to be invading physics.
The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as
special expressions of much wider principles,
principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse
of in their present shape and formulation.
Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth
the name of ' Humanism,' but, for this doctrine
too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be
in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the
name of pragmatism in these lectures.
Such then would be the scope of pragmatism
— first, a method; and second, a genetic theory
65
PRAGMATISM
of what is meant by truth. And these two things
must be our future topics.
What I have said of the theory of truth will,
I am sure, have appeared obscure and unsatis-
factory to most of you by reason of its brevity.
I shall make amends for that hereafter. In
a lecture on ' common sense' I shall try to show
what I mean by truths grown petrified by
antiquity. In another lecture I shall expatiate
on the idea that our thoughts become true in
proportion as they successfully exert their go-
between function. In a third I shall show how
hard it is to discriminate subjective from ob-
jective factors in Truth's development. You
may not follow me wholly in these lectures;
and if you do, you may not wholly agree with
me. But you will, I know, regard me at least
as serious, and treat my effort with respectful
consideration.
You will probably be surprised to learn, then,
that Messrs. Schiller's and Dewey's theories
have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridi-
cule. All rationalism has risen against them.
In influential quarters IN/Ir. Schiller, in partic-
'66
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
ular, has been treated like an impudent school-
boy who deserves a spanking. I should not
mention this, but for the fact that it throws so
much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper
to which I have opposed the temper of prag-
matism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away
from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in
the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist
talk about truths in the plural, about their
utility and satisfactoriness, about the success
with which they 'work,' etc., suggests to the
typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse
lame second-rate makeshift article of truth.
Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are
merely subjective. As against this, objective?
truth must be something non - utilitarian,
haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It
must be an absolute correspondence of our
thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It
must be what we ought to think uncondition-
ally. The conditioned ways in which we do
think are so much irrelevance and matter for
psychology. Down with psychology, up with
logic, in all this question!
67
PRAGMATISM
See the exquisite contrast of the types of
mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and
concreteness, observes truth at its work in par-
ticular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him,
becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite
working- values in experience. For the ration-
alist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare
name of which we must defer. When the prag-
matist undertakes to show in detail just why we
must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize
the concretes from which his own abstraction
is taken. He accuses us of denying truth;
whereas we have only sought to trace exactly
why people follow it and always ought to follow
it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shud-
ders at concreteness: other things equal, he
positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the
two universes were offered, he would always
choose the skinny outline rather than the rich
thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer,
nobler.
I hope that as these lectures go on, the con-
creteness and closeness to facts of the pragma-
tism which they advocate may be what approves
68
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity.
It only follows here the example of the sister-
sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the
observed. It brings old and new harmoniously
together. It converts the absolutely empty
notion of a static relation of * correspondence'
(what that may mean we must ask later) be-
tween our minds and reality, into that of a rich
and active commerce (that any one may follow
in detail and understand) between particular
thoughts of ours, and the great universe of other
experiences in which they play their parts and
have their uses.
But enough of this at present ? The justifica-
tion of what I say must be postponed. I wish
now to add a word in further explanation of the
claim I made at our last meeting, that pragma-
tism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist
ways of thinking with the more religious de-
mands of human beings.
Men who are strongly of the fact-loving tem-
perament, you may remember me to have said,
are liable to be kept at a distance by the small
PRAGMATISM
sympathy with facts which that philosophy
from the present-day fashion of idealism offers
them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fash-
ioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of
God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of
unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but,
so long as it held strongly by the argument from
design, it kept some touch with concrete reali-
ties. Since, however, darwinism has once for all
displaced design from the minds of the 'scien-
tific/ theism has lost that foothold; and some
kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity work-
ing in things rather than above them is, if any,
the kind recommended to our contemporary
imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion
turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays to-
wards idealistic pantheism than towards the
older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that
the latter still counts able defenders.
But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of
pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate
if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded.
It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust
and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no con-
70
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
nexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming
the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for
God, to be the rational presupposition of all
particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it re-
mains supremely indifferent to what the par-
ticular facts in our world actually are. Be they
what they may, the Absolute will father them.
Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints
lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum.
You cannot redescend into the world of par-
ticulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any
necessary consequences of detail important for
your life from your idea of his nature. He gives
you indeed the assurance that all is well with
Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but
thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by
your own temporal devices.
Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this
conception, or its capacity to yield religious
comfort to a most respectable class of minds.
But from the human point of view, no one can
pretend that it does n't suffer from the faults of
remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently
a product of what I have ventured to call the
71
PRAGMATISM
rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's
needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real
world's richness. It is dapper, it is noble in the
bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to
be inapt for humble service. In this real world
of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a
view of things is ' noble,' that ought to count as
a presumption against its truth, and as a phil-
osophic disqualification. The prince of dark-
ness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is,
but whatever the God of earth and heaven is,
he can surely be no gentleman. His menial
services are needed in the dust of our human
trials, even more than his dignity is needed in
the empyrean.
Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to
facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary
empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no
objection whatever to the realizing of abstract-
ions, so long as you get about among particu-
lars with their aid and they actually carry you
somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but
those which our minds and our experiences
work out together, she has no a priori preju-
72
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
dices against theology. // theological ideas
prove to have a value for concrete life, they will
be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being
good for so much. For how much more they are
true, will depend entirely on their relations to the
other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
What I said just now about the Absolute,
of transcendental idealism, is a case in point.
First, I called it majestic and said it yielded
religious comfort to a class of minds, and then
I accused it of remoteness and sterility. But
so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not
sterile; it has that amount of value; it per-
forms a concrete function. As a good pragma-
tist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true
'in so far forth,' then; and I unhesitatingly now
do so.
But what does true in so far forth mean in this
case ? To answer, we need only apply the prag-
matic method. What do believers in the Abso-
lute mean by saying that their belief affords
them comfort ? They mean that since, in the
Absolute finite evil is 'overruled' already, we
may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the
73
PRAGMATISM
temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be
sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without
sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our
finite responsibility. In short, they mean that
we have a right ever and anon to take a moral
holiday, to let the world wag in its own way,
feeling that its issues are in better hands than
ours and are none of our business.
The universe is a system of which the indi-
vidual members may relax their anxieties occa-
sionally, in which the don't-care mood is also
right for men, and moral holidays in order, —
that, if I mistake not, is part, at least, of what
the Absolute is 'known-as,' that is the great
difference in our particular experiences which
his being true makes, for us, that is his cash-
value when he is pragmatically interpreted.
Farther than that the ordinary lay-reader in
philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute
idealism does not venture to sharpen his con-
ceptions. He can use the Absolute for so much,
and so much is very precious. He is pained at
hearing you speak incredulously of the Abso-
lute, therefore, and disregards your criticisms
74
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
because they deal with aspects of the concept-
ion that he fails to follow.
If the Absolute means this, and means no
more than this, who can possibly deny the truth
of it ? To deny it would be to insist that men
should never relax, and that holidays are never
in order.
I am well aware how odd it must seem to
some of you to hear me say that an idea is 'true*
so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.
That it is good, for as much as it profits, you
will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is
good, you will allow the idea itself to be good
in so far forth, for we are the better for possess-
ing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the
word 'truth,' you will say, to call ideas also
'true' for this reason?
To answer this difficulty fully is impossible
at this stage of my account. You touch here
upon the very central point of Messrs. Schiller's,
Dewey's and my own doctrine of truth, which
I can not discuss with detail until my sixth
lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth
is one species of good, and not, as is usually sup-
75
PRAGMATISM
posed, a category distinct from good, and co-or-
dinate with it. The true is the name of whatever
proves itself to be good in the way of belief,
and good9 too, for definite, assignable reasons..
Surely you must admit this, that if there were
wo good for life in true ideas, or if the know-
ledge of them were positively disadvantageous
and false ideas the only useful ones, then the
current notion that truth is divine and precious,
and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown
up or become a dogma. In a world like that,
our duty would be to shun truth, rather. But
in this world, just as certain foods are not only
agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth,
our stomach, and our tissues ; so certain ideas
are not only agreeable to think about, or agree-
able as supporting other ideas that we are fond
of, but they are also helpful in life's practical
struggles. If there be any life that it is really
better we should lead, and if there be any idea
which, if believed in, would help us to lead that
life, then it would be really better for us to believe
in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it inci-
dentally clashed with other greater vital benefits.
76
WHAT P&AGMATISM MEANS
'What would be better for us to believe'!
This sounds very like a definition of truth. It
comes very near to saying 'what we ought to
believe ' : and in that definition none of you
would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to
believe what it is better for us to believe ? And
can we then keep the notion of what is better
for us, and what is true for us, permanently
apart ?
Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with
her. Probably you also agree, so far as the ab-
stract statement goes, but with a suspicion that
if we practically did believe everything that
made for good in our own personal lives, we
should be found indulging all kinds of fancies
about this world's affairs, and all kinds of senti-
mental superstitions about a world hereafter.
Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well
founded, and it is evident that something hap-
pens when you pass from the abstract to the
concrete that complicates the situation.
I said just now that what is better for us to
believe is true unless the belief incidentally
clashes with some other vital benefit. Now in
77
PRAGMATISM
real life what vital benefits is any particular
belief of ours most liable to clash with ? What
indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other
beliefs when these prove incompatible with the
first ones ? In other words, the greatest enemy
of any one of our truths may be the rest of our
truths. Truths have once for all this desperate
instinct of self-preservation and of desire to
extinguish whatever contradicts them. My
belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does
me, must run the gauntlet of all my other be-
liefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me
a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it,
— and let me speak now confidentially, as it
were, and merely in my own private person,
— it clashes with other truths of mine whose
benefits I hate to give up on its account. It
happens to be associated with a kind of
logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it
entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that
are inacceptable, etc., etc. But as I have
enough trouble in life already without adding
the trouble of carrying these intellectual in-
consistencies, I personally just give up the
78
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
Absolute. I just take my moral holidays; or else
as a professional philosopher, I try to justify
them by some other principle.
If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute
to its bare holiday-giving value, it would n't
clash with my other truths. But we can not
easily thus restrict our hypotheses. They carry
supernumerary features, and these it is that
clash so. \ My disbelief in the Absolute means
then disbelief in those other supernumerary
features, for I fully believe in the legitimacy of
taking moral holidays;
You see by this what I meant when I called
pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and
said, borrowing the word from Papini, that she
*unstiffens' our theories. She has in fact no
prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas,
no rigid canons of what shall count as proof.
She is completely genial. She will entertain
any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence.
It follows that in the religious field she is at
a great advantage both over positivistic empir-
icism, with its anti-theological bias, and over
religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest
79
PRAGMATISM
in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the
abstract in the way of conception.
In short, she widens the field of search for
God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empy-
rean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses.
Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to fol-
low either logic or the senses and to count the
humblest and most personal experiences. She
will count mystical experiences if they have
practical consequences. She will take a God
who lives in the very dirt of private fact — if
that should seem a likely place to find him.
Her only test of probable truth is what works
best in the way of leading us, what fits every
part of life best and combines with the collect-
ivity of experience's demands, nothing being
omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if
the notion of God, in particular, should prove
to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny
God's existence? She could see no meaning
in treating as 'not true' a notion that was prag-
matically so successful. What other kind of
truth could there be, for her, than all this agree-
ment with concrete reality ?
80
WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS
In my last lecture I shall return again to the
relations of pragmatism with religion. But you
see already how democratic she is. Her man-
ners are as various and flexible, her resources
as rich and endless, and her conclusions as
friendly as those of mother nature.
Ill
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
PRAGMATICALLY CONSIDERED
LECTURE III
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
PRAGMATICALLY CONSIDERED
I AM now to make the pragmatic method more
familiar by giving you some illustrations of its
application to particular problems. I will begin
with what is driest, and the first thing I shall
take will be the problem of Substance. Every
one uses the old distinction between substance
and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very
structure of human language, in the difference
between grammatical subject and predicate.
Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes,
attributes, properties, accidents, or affections,
— use which term you will, — are whiteness,
friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water,
etc., etc. But the bearer of these attributes is
so much chalk, which thereupon is called the
substance in which they inhere. So the attri-
butes of this desk inhere in the substance 'wood/
those of my coat in the substance 'wool,' and
so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again,
in spite of their differences, common properties,
85
PRAGMATISM
and in so far forth they are themselves
counted as modes of a still more primal sub-
stance, matter, the attributes of which are
space-occupancy and impenetrability. Simi-
larly our thoughts and feelings are affections
or properties of our several souls, which are
substances, but again not wholly in their own
right, for they are modes of the still deeper
substance 'spirit.'
Now it was very early seen that all we know
of the chalk is the whiteness, friability, etc.,
all we know of the wood is the combustibility
and fibrous structure. A group of attributes is
what each substance here is known-as, they
form its sole cash-value for our actual experi-
ence. The substance is in every case revealed
through them; if we were cut off from them
we should never suspect its existence; and if
God should keep sending them to us in an
unchanged order, miraculously annihilating
at a certain moment the substance that sup-
. ported them, we never could detect the mo-
ment, for our experiences themselves would be
unaltered. Nominalists accordingly adopt the
. 86
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
opinion that substance is a spurious idea due
to our inveterate human trick of turning names
into things. Phenomena come in groups — the
chalk-group, the wood-group,. etc., — and each
group gets its name. The name we then treat as
in a way supporting the group of phenomena.
The low thermometer to-day, for instance, is
supposed to come from something called the
'climate.' Climate is really only the name for
a certain group of days, but it is treated as if it
lay behind the day, and in general we place the
name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it
is the name of. But the phenomenal properties
of things, nominalists say, surely do not really
inhere in names, and if not in names then they
do not inhere in anything. They adhere, or
cohere, rather, with each other, and the notion of
a substance inaccessible to us, which we think
accounts for such cohesion by supporting it, as
cement might support pieces of mosaic, must
be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion
itself is all that the notion of the substance
signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.
Scholasticism has taken the notion of sub-
87
PRAGMATISM
stance from common sense and made it very
technical and articulate. Few things would
seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences
for us than substances, cut off as we are from
every contact with them. Yet in one case
scholasticism has proved the importance of the
substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
refer to certain disputes about the mystery
of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear
to have momentous pragmatic value. Since
the accidents of the wafer don't change in the
Lord's supper, and yet it has become the very
body of Christ, it must be that the change is
in the substance solely. The bread-substance
must have been withdrawn, and the divine sub-
stance substituted miraculously without alter-
ing the immediate sensible properties. But
tho these don't alter, a tremendous difference
has been made, no less a one than this, that we
who take the sacrament, now feed upon the
very substance of divinity. The substance-notion
breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect,
if once you allow that substances can separate
from their accidents, and exchange these latter.
88
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
This is the only pragmatic application of the
substance-idea with which I am acquainted;
and it is obvious that it will only be treated seri-
ously by those who already believe in the * real
presence' on independent grounds.
Material substance was criticised by Berkeley
with such telling effect that his name has re-
verberated through all subsequent philosophy.
Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter
is so well known as to need hardly more than
a mention. So far from denying the external
world which we know, Berkeley corroborated
it. It was the scholastic notion of a material
substance unapproachable by us, behind the
external world, deeper and more real than it,
and needed to support it, which Berkeley main-
tained to be the most effective of all reducers
of the external world to unreality. Abolish
that substance, he said, believe that God, whom
you can understand and approach, sends you
the sensible world directly, and you confirm
the latter and back it up by his divine author-
ity. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was con-
sequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is
89
PRAGMATISM
known as our sensations of colour, figure,
hardness and the like. They are the cash-value
of the term. The difference matter makes to
us by truly being is that we then get such
sensations; by not being, is that we lack them.
These sensations then are its sole meaning.
Berkeley does n't deny matter, then; he simply
tells us what it consists of. It is a true name
for just so much in the way of sensations.
Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar
pragmatic criticism to the . notion of spiritual
substance. I will only mention Locke's treat-
ment of our 'personal identity.' He immedi-
ately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value
in terms of experience. It means, he says, so
much 'consciousness,' namely the fact that at
one moment of life we remember other mo-
ments, and feel them all as parts of one and
the same personal history. Rationalism had ex-
plained this practical continuity in our life by
the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke
says : suppose that God should take away the
consciousness, should we be any the better
for having still the soul-principle? Suppose
90
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
he annexed the same consciousness to different
souls, should we, as we realize ourselves, be any
the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the
soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or pun-
ished. See how Locke, discussing it from this
point of view, keeps the question pragmatic :
"Suppose," he says, "one to think himself
to be the same soul that once was Nestor or
Thersites. Can he think their actions his own
any more than the actions of any other man
that ever existed? But let him once find himself
conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he
then finds himself the same person writh Nestor
... In this personal identity is founded all
the right and justice of reward and punish-
ment. It may be reasonable to think, no one
shall be made to answer for what he knows
nothing of, but shall receive his doom, his con-
sciousness accusing or excusing. Supposing
a man punished now for what he had done in
another life, whereof he could be made to have
no consciousness at all, what difference is there
between that punishment and being created
miserable?"
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PRAGMATISM
Our personal identity, then, consists, for
Locke, solely in pragmatically definable par-
ticulars. Whether, apart from these verifiable
facts, it also inheres in a spiritual principle, is
a merely curious speculation. Locke, compro- •
miser that he was, passively tolerated the
belief in a substantial soul behind our con-
sciousness. But his successor Hume, and most
empirical psychologists after him, have denied
the soul, save as the name for verifiable co-
hesions in our inner life. They redescend into
the stream of experience with it, and cash it
into so much small-change value in the way
of 'ideas' and their peculiar connexions with
each other. As I said of Berkeley's matter,
the soul is good or 'true' for just so much, but
no more.
The mention of material substance naturally
suggests the doctrine of 'materialism,' but
philosophical materialism is not necessarily
knit up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphys-
ical principle. One may deny matter in that
sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be
a phenomenalist like Huxley, and yet one may
92
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
still be a materialist in the wider sense, of ex-
plaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and
leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy
of its blinder parts and forces. It is in this
wider sense of the word that materialism is op-
posed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of
physical nature are what run things, material-
ism says. The highest productions of human
genius might be ciphered by one who had com-
plete acquaintance with the facts, out of their
physiological conditions, regardless whether
nature be there only for our minds, as idealists
contend, or not. Our minds in any case would
have to record the kind of nature it is, and write
it down as operating through blind laws of
physics. This is the complexion of present day
materialism, which may better be called natur-
alism. Over against it stands 'theism,' or what
in a wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.'
Spiritualism says that mind not only wit-
nesses and records things, but also runs and
operates them: the world being thus guided,
not by its lower, but by its higher element.
Treated as it often is, this question becomes
PRAGMATISM
little more than a conflict between aesthetic pre-
ferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy;
spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is
more consonant with the dignity of the uni-
- erse to give the primacy in it to what appears
superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling
principle. To treat abstract principles as final-
ities, before which our intellects may come to
rest in a state of admiring contemplation, is the
great rationalist failing. Spiritualism, as often
held, may be simply a state of admiration for
one kind, and of dislike for another kind, of
abstraction. I remember a worthy spiritualist
professor who always referred to materialism
as the 'mud-philosophy/ and deemed it thereby
refuted.
To such spiritualism as this there is an easy
answer, and Mr. Spencer makes it effectively.
In some well-written pages at the end of the
first volume of his Psychology he shows us that
a 'matter' so infinitely subtile, and perform-
ing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as
those which modern science postulates in her
explanations, has no trace of grossness left.
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SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
He shows that the conception of spirit, as we
mortals hitherto have framed it, is itself too
gross to cover the exquisite tenuity of nature's
facts. Both terms, he says, are. but svmbols,
pointing to that one unknowable reality in
which their oppositions cease.
To an abstract objection an abstract rejoin-
der suffices ; and so far as one's opposition to
materialism springs from one's disdain of mat-
ter as something 'crass,' Mr. Spencer cuts the
ground from under one. Matter is indeed
infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one
who has ever looked on the face of a dead child
or parent the mere fact that matter could have
taken for a time that precious form, ought to
make matter sacred ever after. It makes no
difference what the principle of life may be,
material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-
operates, lends itself to all life's purposes.
That beloved incarnation was among matter's
possibilities.
But now, instead of resting in principles,
after this stagnant intellectualist fashion, let
us apply the pragmatic method to 'Jie question.
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PRAGMATISM
What do we mean by matter ? What practical
difference can it make now that the world should
be run by matter or by spirit ? I think we find
that the problem takes with this a rather differ-
ent character.
And first of all I call your attention to a curi-
ous fact. It makes not a single jot of difference
so far as the past of the world goes, whether we
deem it to have been the work of matter or
whether we think a divine spirit was its author.
Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the
world to be once for all irrevocably given.
Imagine it to end this very moment, and to
have no future; and then let a theist and a
materialist apply their rival explanations to its
history. The theist shows how a God made
it ; the materialist shows, and we will suppose
with equal success, how it resulted from blind
physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be
asked to choose between their theories. How
can he apply his test if a world is already com-
pleted ? Concepts for him are things to come
back into experience with, things to make us
look for differences. But by hypothesis there
96
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
is to be no more experience and no possible dif-
ferences can now be looked for. Both theories
have shown all their consequences and, by
the hypothesis we are adopting, these are iden-
tical. The pragmatist must consequently say
that the two theories, in spite of their different-
sounding names, mean exactly the same thing,
and that the dispute is purely verbal. [I am
supposing, of course, that the theories have
been equally successful in their explanations
of what is.]
For just consider the case sincerely, and say
what would be the worth of a God if he were
there, with his work accomplished and his
world run down. He would be worth no more
than just that world was worth. To that amount
of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his
creative power could attain but go no farther.
And since there is to be no future; since the
whole value and meaning of the world has been
already paid in and actualized in the feelings
that went with it in the passing, and now go
with it in the ending; since it draws no sup-
plemental significance (such as our real world
97
PRAGMATISM
draws) from its function of preparing some-
thing yet to come; why then, by it we take
God's measure, as it were. He is the Being who
could once for all do that; and for that much we
are thankful to him, but for nothing more. But
now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely, that
the bits of matter following their laws could
make that world and do no less, should we not
be just as thankful to them ? Wherein should
we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an
hypothesis and made the matter alone respon-
sible ? Where would any special deadness, or
crassness, come in ? And how, experience being
what is once for all, would God's presence in
it make it any more living or richer ?
Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer
to this question . The actually experienced world
is supposed to be the same in its details on either
hypothesis, 'the same, for our praise or blame,'
as Browning says. It stands there indef easibly :
a gift which can't be taken back. Calling mat-
ter the cause of it retracts no single one of the
items that have made it up, nor does calling
God the cause augment them. They are the
98
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
God or the atoms, respectively, of just that and
no other world. The God, if there, has been
doing just what atoms could do — appearing
in the character of atoms, so to speak — and
earning such gratitude as is due to atoms, and
no more. If his presence lends no different
turn or issue to the performance, it surely can
lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would in-
dignity come to it were he absent, and did the
atoms remain the only actors on the stage.
When a play is once over, and the curtain down,
you really make it no better by claiming an il-
lustrious genius for its author, just as you make
it no worse by calling him a common hack.
Thus if no future detail of experience or con-
duct is to be deduced from our hypothesis,
the debate between materialism and theism be-
comes quite idle and insignificant. Matter and
God in that event mean exactly the same thing
— the power, namely, neither more nor less,
that could make just this completed world —
and the wise man is he who in such a case would
turn his back on such a supererogatory discus-
sion. Accordingly, most men instinctively, and
99
PRAGMATISM
positivists and scientists deliberately, do turn
their backs on philosophical disputes from
which nothing in the line of definite future con-
sequences can be seen to follow. The verbal
and empty character of philosophy is surely '
a reproach with which we are but too familiar.
If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound
reproach unless the theories under fire can be
shown to have alternative practical outcomes,
however delicate and distant these may be.
The common man and the • scientist say they
discover no such outcomes, and if the meta-
physician can discern none either, the others
certainly are in the right of it, as against him.
His science is then but pompous trifling; and
the endowment of a professorship for such a
being would be silly.
Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical
debate some practical issue, however conjec-
tural and remote, is involved. To realize this,
revert with me to our question, and place your-
selves this time in the world we live in, in the
world that has a future, that is yet uncompleted
whilst we speak. In this unfinished world the
100
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
alternative of 'materialism or theism?' is in-
tensely practical ; and it is worth while for us to
spend some minutes of our hour in seeing that
it is so.
How, indeed, does the program differ for us,
according as we consider that the facts of ex-
perience up to date are purposeless configura-
tions of blind atoms moving according to eter-
nal laws, or that on the other hand they are
due to the providence of God? As far as the
past facts go, indeed, there is no difference.
Those facts are in, are bagged, are captured;
and the good that's in them is gained, be the
atoms or be the God their cause. There are
accordingly many materialists about us to-day
who, ignoring altogether the future and prac-
tical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate
the odium attaching to the word materialism,
and even to eliminate the word itself, by show-
ing that, if matter could give birth to all these
gains, why then matter, functionally considered,
is just as divine an entity as God, in fact co-
alesces with God, is what you mean by God.
Cease, these persons advise us, to use either of
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PRAGMATISM
these terms, with their outgrown opposition.
Use a term free of the clerical connotations, on
the one hand; of the suggestion of grossness,
coarseness, ignobility, on the other. Talk of the
primal mystery, of the unknowable energy, of
the one and only power, instead of saying either
God or matter. This is the course to which Mr.
Spencer urges us; and if philosophy were
purely retrospective, he would thereby pro-
claim himself an excellent pragmatist.
But philosophy is prospective also, and, after
finding what the world has been and done, and
yielded, still asks the further question 'what
does the world promise ? ' Give us a matter that
promises success, that is bound by its laws to
lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and
any rational man will worship that matter as
readily as Mr. Spencer worships his own so-
called unknowable power. It not only has
made for righteousness up to date, but it will
make for righteousness forever; and that is all
we need. Doing practically all that a God can
do, it is equivalent to God, its function is a
God's function, and in a world in which a God
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SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
would be superfluous ; from such a world a God
could never lawfully be missed. ' Cosmic
emotion' would here be the right name for
religion.
But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's
process of cosmic evolution is carried on any
such principle of never-ending perfection as
this? Indeed it is not, for the future end of
every cosmically evolved thing or system of
things is foretold by science to be death trag-
edy; and Mr. Spencer, in confining himself to
the aesthetic and ignoring the practical side of
the controversy, has really contributed nothing
serious to its relief. But apply now our prin-
ciple of practical results, and see what a vital
significance the question of materialism or
theism immediately acquires.
Theism and materialism, so indifferent when
taken retrospectively, point, when we take
them prospectively, to wholly different out-
looks of experience. For, according to the
theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of re-
distribution of matter and motion, though they
are certainly to thank for all the good hours
103
PRAGMATISM
which our organisms have ever yielded us and
for all the ideals which our minds now frame,
are yet fatally certain to undo their work again,
and to redissolve everything that they have
once evolved. You all know the picture of the
last state of the universe, which evolutionary
science foresees. I can not state it better than
in Mr. Balfour's words: "The energies of our
system will decay, the glory of the sun will be
dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will
no longer tolerate the race which has for a mo-
ment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down
into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish.
The uneasy consciousness which in this ob-
scure corner has for a brief space broken the
contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.
Matter will know itself no longer. ' Imperish-
able monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death
itself, and love stronger than death, will be as
if they had not been. Nor will anything that is,
be better or worse for all that the labor, genius,
devotion, and suffering of man have striven
through countless ages to effect." 1
1 The Foundations of Belief, p. 30.
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SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
That is the sting of it, that in the vast drift-
ings of the cosmic weather, though many a
jewelled shore appears, and many an enchanted
cloucl-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be
dissolved — even as our world now lingers, for
our joy — yet when these transient products
are gone, nothing, absolutely nothing remains,
to represent those particular qualities, those
elements of preciousness which they may have
enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone
utterly from the very sphere and room of being.
Without an echo; without a memory; without
an influence on aught that may come after,
to make it care for similar ideals. This utter
final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scien-
tific materialism as at present understood. The
lower and not the higher forces are the eternal
forces, or the last surviving forces within the
only cycle of evolution which we can definitely
see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as any
one; so why should he argue with us as if we
were making silly aesthetic objections to the
'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the prin-
ciples of his philosophy, when what really
105
PRAGMATISM
dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulte-
rior practical results ?
No, the true objection to materialism is not
positive but negative. It would be farcical at
this day to make complaint of it for what it is,
for 'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness
does — we now know that. We make com-
plaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is not
— not a permanent warrant for our more ideal
interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest hopes.
The notion of God, on the other hand, how-
ever inferior it may be in clearness to those
mathematical notions so current in mechanical
philosophy, has at least this practical superi-
ority over them, that it guarantees an ideal
order that shall be permanently preserved. A
world with a God in it to say the last word, may
indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of
him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure
to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that,
where he is, tragedy is only provisional and
partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the
absolutely final things. This need of an eternal
moral order is one of the deepest needs of our
106
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
breast. And those poets, like Dante and Words-
worth, who live on the conviction of such an
order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic
and consoling power of their verse. Here then,
in these different emotional and practical ap-
peals, in these adjustments of our concrete
attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the
delicate consequences which their differences
entail, lie the real meanings of materialism
and spiritualism — not in hair-splitting ab-
stractions about matter's inner essence, or
about the metaphysical attributes of God.
\ Materialism means simply the denial that the
moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of
ultimate hopes ; spiritualism means the affirm-
ation of an eternal moral order and the letting
loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine
enough, for any one who feels it; and, as long
as men are men, it will yield matter for a
serious philosophic debate.
But possibly some of you may still rally to
their defence. Even whilst admitting that
spiritualism and materialism make different
prophecies of the world's future, you may your-
107
PRAGMATISM
selves pooh-pooh the difference as something
so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a
sane mind. The essence of a sane mind, you
may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel no
concern about such chimseras as the latter end
of the world. Well, I can only say that if you
say this, you do injustice to human nature.
Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a
simple flourish of the word insanity. The ab-
solute things, the last things, the overlapping
things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all
superior minds feel seriously about them, and
the mind with the shortest views is simply the
mind of the more shallow man.
The issues of fact at stake in the debate are
of course vaguely enough conceived by us at
present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms
deals with a world of promise, while material-
ism's sun sets in a sea of disappointment. Re-
member what I said of the Absolute : it grants
us moral holidays. Any religious view does
this. It not only incites our more strenuous
moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless,
trustful moments, and it justifies them. It
108
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
paints the grounds of justification vaguely
enough, to be sure. The exact features of the
saving future facts that our belief in God
insures, will have to be ciphered out by the
interminable methods of science : we can study
our God only by studying his Creation. But
we can enjoy our God, if we have one, in ad-
vance of all that labor. I myself believe that
the evidence for God lies primarily in inner
personal experiences. When they have once
given you your God, his name means at least
the benefit of the holiday. You remember
what I said yesterday about the way in which
truths clash and try to 'down' each other.
The truth of * God 'has to run the gauntlet of
all our other truths. It is on trial by them and
they on trial by it. Our final opinion about
God can be settled only after all the truths have
straightened themselves out together. Let us
hope that they shall find a modus Vivendi!
Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic
problem, the question of design innature. God's
existence has from time immemorial been held
to be proved by certain natural facts. Many
109
PRAGMATISM .
facts appear as if expressly designed in view of
one another. Thus the woodpecker's bill,
tongue, feet, tail, etc., fit him wondrously for a
world of trees, with grubs hid in their bark to
feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of
light to perfection, leading its rays to a sharp
picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of
things diverse in origin argued design, it was
held; and the designer was always treated as
a man-loving deity.
The first step in these arguments was to
prove that the design existed. Nature was ran-
sacked for results obtained through separate
things being co-adapted. Our eyes, for in-
stance, originate in intra-uterine darkness, and
the light originates in the sun, yet see how
they fit each other. They are evidently made
for each other. Vision is the end designed,
light and eyes the separate means devised for
its attainment.
It is strange, considering how unanimously
our ancestors felt the force of this argument, to
see how little it counts for since the triumph
of the darwinian theory. Darwin opened our
110
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
minds to the power of chance-happenings to
bring forth 'fit' results if only they have time to
add themselves together. He showed the enor-
mous waste of nature in producing results that
get destroyed because of their unfitness. He
also emphasized the number of adaptations
which, if designed, would argue an evil rather
than a good designer. Here, all depends upon
the point of view. To the grub under the bark
the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's organ-
ism to extract him would certainly argue a dia-
bolical designer.
Theologians have by this time stretched
their minds so as to embrace the darwinian
facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing
divine purpose. It used to be a question of
purpose against mechanism, of one or the other.
It was as if one should say " My shoes are evi-
dently designed to fit my feet, hence it is im-
possible that they should have been produced
by machinery." We know that they are both:
they are made by a machinery itself designed
to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need only
stretch similarly the designs of God. As the
111
PRAGMATISM
aim of a football-team is not merely to get the
ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they
would simply get up on some dark night and
place it there), but to get it there by a fixed
machinery of conditions — the game's rules and
the opposing players; so the aim of God
is not merely, let us say, to make men and
to save them, but rather to get this done
through the sole agency of nature's vast ma-
chinery. Without nature's stupendous laws
and counter-forces, man's creation and per-
fection, we might suppose, would be too in-
sipid achievements for God to have proposed
them.
This saves the form of the design-argument
at the expense of its old easy human content.
The designer is no longer the old man-like
deity. His designs have grown so vast as to be
incomprehensible to us humans. The what of
them so overwhelms us that to establish the
mere that of a designer for them becomes of
very little consequence in comparison. We can
with difficulty comprehend the character of a
cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed
112
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
by the strange mixture of goods and evils that
we find in this actual world's particulars. Or
rather we cannot by any possibility compre-
hend it. The mere word * design' by itself has
no consequences and explains nothing. It is
the barrenest of principles. The old ques-
tion of whether there is design is idle. The real
question is what is the world, whether or not
it have a designer — and that can be revealed
only by the study of all nature's particulars.
Remember that no matter what nature may
have produced or may be producing, the means
must necessarily have been adequate, must
have been fitted to that production. The argu-
ment from fitness to design would consequently
always apply, whatever were the product's
character. The recent Mont-Pelee eruption,
for example, required all previous history to
produce that exact combination of ruined
houses, human and animal corpses, sunken
ships, volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one
hideous configuration of positions. France had
to be a nation and colonize Martinique. Our
country had to exist and send our ships there.
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PRAGMATISM
// God aimed at just that result, the means
by which the centuries bent their influences
towards it, showed exquisite intelligence. And
so of any state of things whatever, either in
nature or in history, which we find actually
realized. For the parts of things must always
make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or
harmonious. When we look at what has act-
ually come, the conditions must always appear
perfectly designed to ensure it. We can always
say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of any
conceivable character, that the whole cosmic
machinery may have been designed to pro-
duce it.
Pragmatically, then, the abstract word 'de-
sign' is a blank cartridge. It carries no con-
sequences, it does no execution. What design?
and what designer? are the only serious ques-
tions, and the study of facts is the only way of
getting even approximate answers. Mean-
while, pending the slow answer from facts, any
one who insists that there is a designer and who
is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain prag-
matic benefit from the term — the same, in
114
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
fact, which we saw that the terms God, Spirit,
or the Absolute, yield us. 'Design,' worthless
tho it be as a mere rationalistic principle set
above or behind things for our admiration, be-
comes, if our faith concretes it into something
theistic, a term of promise. Returning with it
into experience, we gain a more confiding out-
look on the future. If not a blind force but
a seeing force runs things, we may reasonably
expect better issues. This vague confidence in
the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at
present discernible in the terms design and de-
signer. But if cosmic confidence is right not
wrong, better not worse, that is a most import-
ant meaning. That much at least of possible
'truth* the terms will then have in them.
Let me take up another well-worn contro-
versy, the free-will problem. Most persons who
believe in what is called their free-will do so
after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle,
a positive faculty or virtue added to man, by
which his dignity is enigmatically augmented.
He ought to believe it for this reason. Deter-
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PRAGMATISM
minists, who deny it, who say that individual
men originate nothing, but merely transmit to
the future the whole push of the past cosmos of
which they are so small an expression, dimin-
ish man. He is less admirable, stripped of this
creative principle. I imagine that more than
half of you share our instinctive belief in free-
will, and that admiration of it as a principle of
dignity has much to do with your fidelity.
But free-will has also been discussed prag-
matically, and, strangely, enough, the same
pragmatic interpretation has been put upon
it by both disputants. You know how large
a part questions of accountability have played
in ethical controversy. To hear some persons,
one would suppose that all that ethics aims at
is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does
the old legal and theological leaven, the inter-
est in crime and sin and punishment abide
with us. * Who 's to blame? whom can we
punish? whom will God punish?' — these
preoccupations hang like a bad dream over
man's religious history.
So both free-will and determinism have been
116
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
inveighed against and called absurd, because
each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to
prevent the ' imputability ' of good or bad deeds
to their authors. Queer antinomy this ! Free-
will means novelty, the grafting on to the past
of something not involved therein. If our acts
were predetermined, if we merely transmitted
the push of the whole past, the free-willists say,
how could we be praised or blamed for any-
thing? We should be 'agents' only, not 'prin-
cipals,' and where then would be our precious
imputability and responsibility?
But where would it be if we had free-will?
rejoin the determinists. If a 'free' act be a
sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the
previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks
itself on to me, how can /, the previous I, be
responsible? How can I have any permanent
character that will stand still long enough for
praise or blame to be awarded? The chaplet of
my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected
beads as soon as the thread of inner neces-
sity is drawn out by the preposterous in-
determinist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton and
117
PRAGMATISM
x»
McTaggart have recently laid about them
doughtily with this argument.
It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it
is pitiful. For I ask you, quite apart from
other reasons, whether any man, woman or
child, with a sense for realities, ought not to be
ashamed to plead such principles as either
dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility
between them can safely be trusted to carry on
the social business of punishment and praise.
If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if
he does bad acts we shall punish him, — any-
how, and quite apart from theories as to
whether the acts result from what was previ-
ous in him or are novelties in a strict sense.
To make our human ethics revolve about the
question of 'merit' is a piteous unreality —
God alone can know our merits, if we have
any. The real ground for supposing free-will
is indeed pragmatic, but it has nothing to do
with this contemptible right to punish which
has made such a noise in past discussions of
the subject.
Free-will pragmatically means novelties in
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SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
the world, the right to expect that in its deepest
elements as well as in its surface phenomena,
the future may not identically repeat and
imitate the past. That imitation en masse is
there, who can deny? The general * uniformity
of nature' is presupposed by every lesser law.
But nature may be only approximately uni-
form; and persons in whom knowledge of the
world's past has bred pessimism (or doubts
as to the world's good character, which be-
come certainties if that character be supposed
eternally fixed) may naturally welcome free-
will as a melioristic doctrine. It holds up
improvement as at least possible; whereas de-
terminism assures us that our whole notion of
possibility is born of human ignorance, and
that necessity and impossibility between them
rule the destinies of the world.
Free-will is thus a general cosmological
theory of promise, just like the Absolute, God,
Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one of
these terms has any inner content, none of them
gives us any picture, and no one of them would
retain the least pragmatic value in a world
119
PRAGMATISM
whose character was obviously perfect from
the start. Elation at mere existence, pure cos-
mic emotion and delight, would, it seems to
me, quench all interest in those speculations,
if the world were nothing but a lubberland of
happiness already. Our interest in religious
metaphysics arises in the fact that our empir-
ical future feels to us unsafe, and needs some
higher guarantee. If the past and present were
purely good, who could wish that the future
might possibly not resemble them? Who could
desire free-will? Who would not say, with
Huxley, ' let me be wound up every day like
a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better
freedom.' 'Freedom' in a world already per->
feet could only mean freedom to be worse, and
who could be so insane as to wish that? To be
necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught
else, would put the last touch of perfection upon
optimism's universe. Surely the only possibility
that one can rationally claim is the possibility
that things may be better. That possibility, I
need hardly say, is one that, as the actual world
goes, we have ample grpunds for desiderating.
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SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be
a doctrine of relief. As such, it takes its place
with other religious doctrines. Between them,
they build up the old wastes and repair the
former desolations. Our spirit, shut within
this courtyard of sense-experience, is always
saying to the intellect upon the tower: 'Watch-
man, tell us of the night, if it aught of promise
bear,' and the intellect gives it then these terms
of promise.
Other than this practical significance, the
words God, free-will, design, etc., have none.
Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or intel-
lectualistically taken, when we bear them into
life's thicket with us the darkness there grows
light about us. If you stop, in dealing with such
words, with their definition, thinking that to
be an intellectual finality, where are you? Stu-
pidly staring at a pretentious sham! "Deus est
Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessa-
rium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, im-
mutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens,"
etc., — wherein is such a definition really in-
structive? It means less than nothing, in its
121
PRAGMATISM
pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone
can read a positive meaning into it, and for that
she turns her back upon the intellectualist
point of view altogether. * God's in his heaven;
all's right with the world!'-- That's the real
heart of your theology, and for that you need
no rationalist definitions.
Why should n't all of us, rationalists as well
as pragmatists, confess this? Pragmatism, so
far from keeping her eyes bent on the imme-
-diate practical foreground, as she is accused of
doing, dwells just as much upon the world's
remotest perspectives.
See then how all these ultimate questions
turn, as it were, upon their hinges; and from
looking backwards upon principles, upon an
erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausali-
tatsprinzip, a Design, a Free-will, taken in
themselves, as something august and exalted
above facts, — see, I say, how pragmatism shifts
the emphasis and looks forward into facts them-
selves. The really vital question for us all is,
What is this world going to be? What is life
eventually to make of itself? The centre of
SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS
gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its
place. The earth of things, long thrown into
shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must
resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this
way means that philosophic questions will fall
to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist
type than heretofore, minds more scientific and
individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious
either. It will be an alteration in ' the seat of
authority ' that reminds one almost of the pro-
testant reformation. And as, to papal minds,
protestantism has often seemed a mere mess
of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will
pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist
minds in philosophy. It will seem so much
sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on,
all the same, and compasses its ends, in pro-
testant countries. I venture to think that
philosophic protestantism will compass a not
dissimilar prosperity.
IV
THE ONE AND THE MANY
LECTURE IV
THE ONE AND THE MANY
fV E saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic
method, in its dealings with certain concepts,
instead of ending with admiring contemplation,
plunges forward into the river of experience
with them and prolongs the perspective by their
means. Design, free-will, the absolute mind,
spirit instead of matter, have for their sole
meaning a better promise as to this world's out-
come/ Be they false or be they true, the mean-
ing of them is this meliorism. I have sometimes
thought of the phenomenon called 'total re-
flexion' in Optics as a good symbol of the rela-
tion between abstract ideas and concrete reali-
ties, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold a tumbler
of water a little above your eyes and look up
through the water at its surface — or better
still look similarly through the flat wall of an
aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily
brilliant reflected image say of a candle-flame,
or any other clear object, situated on the op-
posite side of the vessel. No ray, under these
127
PRAGMATISM
circumstances gets beyond the water's surface :
every ray is totally reflected back into the
depths again. Now let the water represent the
world of sensible facts, and let the air above it
represent the world of abstract ideas. Both
worlds are real, of course, and interact; but
they interact only at their boundary, and the
locus of everything that lives, and happens to
us, so far as full experience goes, is the water.
We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense,
bounded above by the superior element, but
unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. We
get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it
incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and
every time we touch it, we turn back into the
water with our course re-determined and re-en-
ergized. The abstract ideas of which the air
consists are indispensable for life, but irrespir-
able by themselves, as it were, and only active
in their re-directing function. All similes are
halting, but this one rather takes my fancy. It
shows how something, not sufficient for life in
itself, may nevertheless be an effective deter-
minant of life elsewhere.
128
THE ONE AND THE MANY
In this present hour I wish to illustrate the
pragmatic method by one more application. I
wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem
of 'the one and the many.' I suspect that in
but few of you has this problem occasioned
sleepless nights, and I should not be aston-
ished if some of you told me it had never vexed
you at all. I myself have come, by long brood-
ing over it, to consider it the most central of all
philosophic problems, central because so preg-
nant. I mean by this that if you know whether
a man is a decided monist or a decided plural-
ist, you perhaps know more about the rest of
his opinions than if you give him any other
name ending in ist. To believe in the one
or in the many, that is the classification with
the maximum number of consequences. So
bear with me for an hour while I try to inspire
you with my own interest in this problem.
Philosophy has often been defined as the
quest or the vision of the world's unity. Few
persons ever challenge this definition, which is
true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed
manifested above all things its interest in unity.
129
PRAGMATISM
But how about the variety in things? Is that
such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using
the term philosophy, we talk in general of our
intellect and its needs, we quickly see that unity
is only one of them. Acquaintance with the de-
tails of fact is always reckoned, along with their
reduction to system, as an indispensable mark
of mental greatness. Your 'scholarly' mind,
of encyclopedic, philological type, your man
essentially of learning, has never lacked for
praise along with your philosopher. What our
intellect really aims at is neither variety nor
unity taken singly, but totality.1 In this, ac-
quaintance with reality's diversities is as im-
portant as understanding their connexion. Cu-
riosity goes pari passu with the systematizing
passion.
In spite i of this obvious fact the unity of
things has always been considered more illus-
trious, as it were, than their variety. When a
young man first conceives the notion that the
whole world forms one great fact, with all its
1 Compare A. Bellanger: Les concepts de Cause, et I'activite inten-
tionelle de VEsprit. Paris, Alcan, 1905, p. 79 ff.
130
THE ONE AND THE MANY
parts moving abreast, as it were, and inter-
locked, he feels as if he were enjoying a great
insight, and looks superciliously on all who still
fall short of this sublime conception. Taken
thus abstractly as it first comes to one, the mon-
istic insight is so vague as hardly to seem worth
defending intellectually. Yet probably every
one in this audience in some way cherishes it.
A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional
response to the character of oneness, as if it
were a feature of the world not co-ordinate with
its many ness, but vastly more excellent and
eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles that
we might almost call it a part of philosophic
common sense. Of course the world is One,
we say. How else could it be a world at all ?
Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of
this abstract kind as rationalists are.
The difference is that the empiricists are less
dazzled. Unity doesn't blind them to every-
thing else, doesn't quench their curiosity for
special facts, whereas there is a kind of ration-
alist who is sure to interpret abstract unity mys-
tically and to forget everything else, to treat it
131
PRAGMATISM
as a principle; to admire and worship it;
and thereupon to come to a full stop intellect-
ually.
'The world is One!' — the formula may be-
come a sort of number- worship. 'Three' and
'seven' have, it is true, been reckoned sacred
numbers; but, abstractly taken, why is 'one'
more excellent than 'forty- three,' or than 'two
million and ten ' ? In this first vague conviction
of the world's unity, there is so little to take
hold of that we hardly know what we mean
by it.
The only way to get forward with our notion
is to treat it pragmatically. Granting the one-
ness to exist, what facts will be different in con-
sequence? What will the unity be known as?
The world is One — yes, but how one. What
is the practical value of the oneness for us.
Asking such questions, we pass from the
vague to the definite, from the abstract to the
concrete. Many distinct ways in which a one-
ness predicated of the universe might make
a difference, come to view. I will note succes-
sively the more obvious of these ways.
132
THE ^NE AND THE MANY
1. First, the world is at least one subject of
discourse. If its manyness were so irremedi-
able as to permit no union whatever of its parts,
not even our minds could ' mean ' the whole of
it at once: they would be like eyes trying to
look in opposite directions. But in point of
fact we mean to cover the whole of it by our
abstract term 'world' or 'universe/ which ex-
pressly intends that no part shall be left out.
Such unity of discourse carries obviously no
farther monistic specifications. A ' chaos/ once
so named, has as much unity of discourse as
a cosmos. It is an odd fact that many monists
consider a great victory scored for their side
when pluralists say 'the universe is many.'
" ' The Universe' !" they chuckle — " his speech
bewray eth him. He stands confessed of mon-
ism out of his own mouth." Well, let things be
one in so far forth! You can then fling such
a word as universe at the whole collection of
them, but what matters it ? It still remains to
be ascertained whether they are one in any
further or more valuable sense.
2. Are they, for example, continuous? Can
133
PRAGMATIS1V
•
you pass from one to another, keeping always
in your one universe without any danger of
falling out? In other words, do the parts of
our universe hang together, instead of being like
detached grains of sand ?
Even grains of sand hang together through
the space in which they are embedded, and if
you can in any way move through such space,
you can pass continuously from number one
of them to number two. Space and time are
thus vehicles of continuity by which the world's
parts hang together. The practical difference
to us, resultant from these forms of union, is
immense. Our whole motor life is based upon
them.
3. There are innumerable other paths of
practical continuity among things. Lines of in-
fluence can be traced by which they hang to-
gether. Following any such line you pass from
one thing to another till you may have covered
a good part of the universe's extent. Gravity
and heat-conduction are such all-uniting influ-
ences, so far as the physical world goes. Elec-
tric, luminous and chemical influences follow
134
T;HE ONE AND THE MANY
similar lines of influence. But opaque and
inert bodies interrupt the continuity here, so
that you have to step round them, or change
your mode of progress if you wish to get far-
ther on that day. Practically, you have then
lost your universe's unity, so far as it was
constituted by those first lines of influence.
There are innumerable kinds of connexion
that special things have with other special
things; and the ensemble of any one of these
connexions forms one sort of system by which
things are conjoined. Thus men are conjoined
in a vast network ot acquaintanceship. Brown
knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc.;
and by choosing your farther intermediaries
rightly you may carry a message from Jones to
the Empress of China, or the Chief of the Afri-
can Pigmies, or to any one else in the inhabited
world. But you are stopped short, as by a non-
conductor, when you choose one man wrong
in this experiment. What may be called love-
systems are grafted on the acquaintance-sys-
tem. A loves (or hates) B; B loves (or hates)
C, etc. But these systems are smaller than the
135
PRAGMATISM
great acquaintance-system that they presup-
pose.
Human efforts are daily unifying the world
more and more in definite systematic ways.
We found colonial, postal, consular, commer-
cial systems, all the parts of which obey defin-
ite influences that propagate themselves within
the system but not to facts outside of it. The
result is innumerable little hangings-together
of the world's parts within the larger hangings-
together, little worlds, not only of discourse but
of operation, within the wider universe. Each
system exemplifies one type or grade of union,
its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of
relation, and the same part may figure in many
different systems, as a man may hold various
offices and belong to several clubs. From this
'systematic' point of view, therefore, the prag-
matic value of the world's unity is that all these
definite networks actually and practically exist.
Some are more enveloping and extensive, some
less so; they are superposed upon each other;
and between them all they let no individual
elementary part of the universe escape. Enor-
136
THE ONE AND THE MANY
mous as is the amount of disconnexion among
things (for these systematic influences and con-
junctions follow rigidly exclusive paths), every-
thing that exists is influenced in some way by
something else, if you can only pick the way
out rightly. Loosely speaking, and in general, it
may be said that all things cohere and adhere
to each other somehow, and that the universe
exists practically in reticulated or concaten-
ated forms which make of it a continuous
or 'integrated' affair. Any kind of influence
whatever helps to make the world one, so far
as you can follow it from next to next. You
may then say that ' the world is One,' — mean-
ing in these respects, namely, and just so far
as they obtain. But just as definitely is it not
One, so far as they do not obtain; and there is
no species of connexion which will not fail, if,
instead of choosing conductors for it you choose
non-conductors. You are then arrested at your
very first step and have to write the world down
as a pure many from that particular point of
view. If our intellect had been as much inter-
ested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive rela-
137
PRAGMATISM
tions, philosophy would have equally success-
fully celebrated the world's disunion.
The great point is to notice that the oneness
and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate
here. Neither is primordial or more essential
or excellent than the other. Just as with space,
whose separating of things seems exactly on
a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes
one function and sometimes the other is what
comes home to us most, so, in our general deal-
ings with the world of influences, we now need
conductors and now need non-conductors, and
wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the
appropriate moment.
4. All these systems of influence or non-in-
fluence may be listed under the general pro-
blem of the world's causal unity. If the minor
causal influences among things should converge
towards one common causal origin of them in
the past, one great first cause for all that is,
one might then speak of the absolute causal
unity of the world. God's fiat on creation's day
has figured in traditional philosophy as such
an absolute cause and origin. Transcendental
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THE ONE AND THE MANY
~Jealism, translating 'creation' into 'thinking'
(or * willing to think') calls the divine act
* eternal' rather than 'first'; but the union of
the many here is absolute, just the same — the
many would not be, save for the One. Against
this notion of the unity of origin of all things
there has always stood the pluralistic notion
of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of
atoms or even of spiritual units of some sort.
The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic
meaning, but perhaps, as far as these lectures
go, we had better leave the question of unity
of origin unsettled.
5. The most important sort of union that
obtains among things, pragmatically speaking,
is their generic unity. Things exist in kinds,
there are many specimens in each kind, and
what the 'kind' implies for one specimen, it
implies also for every other specimen of that
kind. We can easily conceive that every fact
in the world might be singular, that is, unlike
any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a
world of singulars our logic would be useless,
for logic works by predicating of the single in-
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PRAGMATISM
stance what is true of all its kind. With no two
things alike in the world, we should be unable
to reason from our past experiences to our fu-
ture ones. The existence of so much generic
unity in things is thus perhaps the most mo-
mentous pragmatic specification of what it
may mean to say 'the world is One.' Absolute
generic unity would obtain if there were one
summum genus under which all things without
exception could be eventually subsumed. ' Be-
ings,' 'thinkables,' 'experiences,' would be
candidates for this position. Whether the
alternatives expressed by such words have any
pragmatic significance or not, is another ques-
tion which I prefer to leave unsettled just now.
6. Another specification of what the phrase
'the world is one' may mean is unity of pur-
pose. An enormous number of things in the
world subserve a common purpose. All the
man-made systems, administrative, industrial,
military, or what not, exist each for its control-
ling purpose. Every living being pursues its
own peculiar purposes. They co-operate, ac-
cording to the degree of their development, in
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THE ONE AND THE MANY
collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus
enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely sin-
gle, final and climacteric purpose subserved by
all things without exception might conceivably
be reached. It is needless to say that the ap-
pearances conflict with such a view. Any re-
sultant, as I said in my third lecture, may have
been purposed in advance, but none of the
results we actually know in this world have in
point of fact been purposed in advance in all
their details. Men and nations start with a
vague notion of being rich, or great, or good.
Each step they make brings unforeseen chances
into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the
specifications of the general purpose have to be
daily changed. What is reached in the end may
be bette^ or worse than what was proposed,
but it is always more complex and different.
Our different purposes also are at war with
each other. Where one can't crush the other
out, they compromise; and the result is again
different from what any one distinctly proposed
beforehand. Vaguely and generally, much of
what was purposed may be gained; but every-
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PRAGMATISM
thing makes strongly for the view that our
world is incompletely unified Ideologically
and is still trying to get its unification better
organized.
Whoever claims absolute teleological unity,
saying that there is one purpose that every
detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at
his own risk. Theologians who dogmatize thus
find it more and more impossible, as our ac-
quaintance with the warring interests of the
world's parts grows more concrete, to imagine
what the one climacteric purpose may possibly
be like. We see indeed that certain evils min-
ister to ulterior goods, that the bitter makes the
cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hard-
ship puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can
vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that
all the evil in the universe is but instrumental
to its greater perfection. But the scale of the
evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance;
and transcendental idealism, in the pages of a
Bradley or a Royce, brings us no farther than
the book of Job did — God's ways are not our
ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth.
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THE ONE AND THE MANY
A God who can relish such superfluities of hor-
ror is no God for human beings to appeal to.
His animal spirits are too high. In other
words the 'Absolute* with his one purpose,
is not the man-like God of common people.
7. Esthetic union among things also obtains,
and is very analogous to teleological union.
Things tell a story. Their parts hang together
so as to work out a climax. They play into each
other's hands expressively. Retrospectively,
we can see that altho no definite purpose pre-
sided over a chain of events, yet the events fell
into a dramatic form, with a start, a middle,
and a finish. In point of fact all stories end;
and here again the point of view of a many is
the more natural one to take. The world is full
of partial stories that run parallel to one an-
other, beginning and ending at odd times.
They mutually interlace and interfere at points,
but we can not unify them completely in our
minds. In following your life-history, I must
temporarily turn my attention from my own.
Even a biographer of twins would have to press
them alternately upon his reader's attention.
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PRAGMATISM
It follows that whoever says that the whole
world tells one story utters another of those
monistic dogmas that a man believes at his
risk. It is easy to see the world's history plural-
istically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a
separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-
section of the rope as an absolutely single fact,
and to sum the whole longitudinal series into
one being living an undivided life, is harder. We
have indeed the analogy of embryology to help
us. The microscopist makes a hundred flat
cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally
unites them into one solid whole. But the great
world's ingredients, so far as they are beings,
seem, like the rope's fibres, to be discontinu-
ous, cross-wise, and to cohere only in the longi-
tudinal direction. Followed in that direction
they are many. Even the embryologist, when
he follows the development of his object, has to
treat the history of each single organ in turn.
Absolute aesthetic union is thus another barely
abstract ideal. The world appears as some-
thing more epic than dramatic.
So far, then, we see how the world is unified
144
THE ONE AND THE MANY
by its many systems, kinds, purposes, and
dramas. That there is more union in all these
ways than openly appears is certainly true.
That there may be one sovereign purpose,
system, kind, and story, is a legitimate hypo-
thesis. All I say here is that it is rash to
affirm this dogmatically without better evi-
dence than we possess at present.
8. The great monistic denkmittel for a hun-
dred years past has been the notion of the one
Knower. The many exist only as objects for
his thought — exist in his dream, as it were;
and as he knows them, they have one purpose,
form one system, tell one tale for him. This
notion of an all enveloping noetic unity in things
is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist
philosophy. Those who believe in the Abso-
lute, as the all-knower is termed, usually say
that they do so for coercive reasons, which
clear thinkers can not evade. The Absolute
has far-reaching practical consequences, to
some of which I drew attention in my second
lecture. Many kinds of difference important
to us would surely follow from its being true.
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PRAGMATISM
I can not here enter into all the logical proofs
of such a Being's existence, farther than to say
that none of them seem to me sound. I must
therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower
simply as an hypothesis, exactly on a par logic-
ally with the pluralist notion that there is no
point of view, no focus of information extant,
from which the entire content of the universe
is visible at once. "God's conscience," says
Professor Royce,1 "forms in its wholeness one
luminously transparent conscious moment" —
this is the type of noetic unity on which ration-
alism insists. Empiricism on the other hand
is satisfied with the type of noetic unity that is
humanly familiar. Everything gets known by
some knower along with something else; but
the knowers may in the end be irreducibly
many, and the greatest knower of them all may
yet not know the whole of everything, or even
know what he does know at one single stroke :
— he may be liable to forget. Whichever type
obtained, the world would still be a universe
noetically. Its parts would be conjoined by
1 The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292.
146
\
THE ONE AND THE MANY
knowledge, but in the one case the knowledge
would be absolutely unified, in the other it
would be strung along and overlapped.
The notion of one instantaneous or eternal
Knower — either adjective here means the
same thing — is, as I said, the great intellect-
ualist achievement of our time. It has prac-
tically driven out that conception of 'Sub-
stance' which earlier philosophers set such
store by, and by which so much unifying work
used to be done — universal substance which
alone has being in and from itself, and of which
all the particulars of experience are but forms
to which it gives support. Substance has suc-
cumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the Eng-
lish school. It appears now only as another
name for the fact that phenomena as they come
are actually grouped and given in coherent
forms, the very forms in which we finite know-
ers experience or think them together. These
forms of conjunction are as much parts of the
tissue of experience as are the terms which
they connect; and it is a great pragmatic
achievement for recent idealism to have made
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PRAGMATISM
the world hang together in these directly re-
presentable ways instead of drawing its unity
from the 'inherence' of its parts — whatever
that may mean — in an unimaginable principle
behind the scenes.
'The world is One,' therefore, just so far as
we experience it to be concatenated, One by
as many definite conjunctions as appear. But
then also not One by just as many definite dis-
junctions as we find. The oneness and the
manyness of it thus obtain in respects which
can be separately named. It is neither a uni-
verse pure and simple nor a multiverse pure
and simple. And its various manners of being
One suggest, for their accurate ascertainment,
so many distinct programs of scientific work.
Thus the pragmatic question 'What is the one-
ness known as ? What practical difference will
it make ? ' saves us from all feverish excitement
over it as a principle of sublimity and carries
us forward into the stream of experience with
a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal
far more connexion and union than we now
suspect, but we are not entitled on pragmatic
148
THE ONE AND THE MANY
principles to claim absolute oneness in any
respect in advance.
It is so difficult to see definitely what abso-
lute oneness can mean, that probably the
majority of you are satisfied with the sober
attitude which we have reached. Nevertheless
there are possibly some radically monistic souls
among you who are not content to leave the
one and the many on a par. Union of various
grades, union of diverse types, union that stops
at non-conductors, union that merely goes from
next to next, and means in many cases outer
nextness only, and not a more internal bond,
union of concatenation, in short; all that sort of
thing seems to you a halfway stage of thought.
The oneness of things, superior to their many-
ness, you think must also be more deeply true,
must be the more real aspect of the world. The
pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us a uni-
verse imperfectly rational. The real universe
must form an unconditional unit of being, some-
thing consolidated, with its parts co-implicated
through and through. Only then could we
consider our estate completely rational.
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PRAGMATISM
There is no doubt whatever that this ultra-
monistic way of thinking means a great deal to
many minds. " One Life, One Truth, one Love,
one Principle, One Good, One God" — I quote
from a Christian Science leaflet which the day's
mail brings into my hands — beyond doubt
such a confession of faith has pragmatically an
emotional value, and beyond doubt the word
'one' contributes to the value quite as much as
the other words. But if we try to realize intel-
lectually what we can possibly mean by such a
glut of oneness we are thrown right back upon
our pragmatistic determinations again. It
means either the mere name One, the universe
of discourse; or it means the sum total of all
the ascertainable particular conjunctions and
concatenations ; or, finally, it means some one
vehicle of conjunction treated as all-inclusive,
like one origin, one purpose, or one knower.
In point of fact it always means one knower
to those who take it intellectually to-day. The
one knower involves, they think, the other
forms of conjunction. His world must have
all its parts co-implicated in the one logical-
150
THE ONE AND THE MANY
sesthetical-teleological unit-picture which is
his eternal dream.
The character of the absolute knower's
picture is however so impossible for us to re-
present clearly, that we may fairly suppose
that the authority which absolute monism un-
doubtedly possesses, and probably always will
possess over some persons, draws its strength
far less from intellectual than from mystical
grounds. To interpret absolute monism worth-
ily, be a mystic. Mystical states of mind in
every degree are shown by history, usually tho
not always, to make for the monistic view.
This is no proper occasion to enter upon the
general subject of mysticism, but I will quote
one mystical pronouncement to show just what
I mean. The paragon of all monistic systems
is the Vedanta philosophy of Hindostan, and
the paragon of Vedantist missionaries was the
late Swami Vivekanda who visited our shores
some years ago. The method of Vedantism
is the mystical method. You do not reason,
but after going through a certain discipline you
see, and having seen, you can report the truth.
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PRAGMATISM
Vivekanda thus reports the truth in one of his
lectures here:
"Where is there any more misery for him
who sees this Oneness in the universe, this
Oneness of life, Oneness of everything? . IT
This separation between man and man, man
and woman, man and child, nation from na-
tion, earth from moon, moon from sun, this
separation between atom and atom is the cause
really of all the misery, and the Vedanta says
this separation does not exist, it is not real. It
is merely apparent, on the surface. In the
heart of things there is unity still. If you go in-
side you find that unity between man and man,
women and children, races and races, high and
low, rich and poor, the gods and men : all are
One, and animals too, if you go deep enough,
and he who has attained to that has no more
delusion. . . . Where is there any more delu-
sion for him? What can delude him? He
knows the reality of everything, the secret of
everything. Where is there any more misery
for him? What does he desire ? He has traced
the reality of everything unto the Lord, that
152
THE ONE AND THE MANY
centre, that Unity of everything, and that is
Eternal Bliss, Eternal .Knowledge, Eternal
Existence. Neither death nor disease nor sor-
row nor misery nor discontenl is There . . .
In the Centre, the reality, there is no one to be
mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has
penetrated everything, the Pure One, the
Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the
Knower, He the great Poet, the Self-Existent,
He who is giving to every one what he de-
serves."
Observe how radical the character of the
monism here is. Separation is not simply over-
come by the One, it is denied to exist. There
is no many. We are not parts of the One; It
has no parts; and since in a sense we undeni-
ably are, it must be that each of us is the One,
indivisibly and totally. An Absolute One, and
I that One, — surely we have here a religion
which, emotionally considered, has a high
pragmatic value; it imparts a perfect sumptu-
osity of security. As our Swami says in another
place :
"When man has seen himself as One with
153
PRAGMATISM
the infinite Being of the universe, when all
separateness has ceased, when all men, all wo-
men, all angels, all gods, all animals, all plants,
the whole universe has been melted into that
oneness, then all fear disappears. Whom to
fear ? Can I hurt myself ? Can I kill myself ?
Can I injure myself? Do you fear yourself?
Then will all sorrow disappear. What can
cause me sorrow ? I am the One Existence of
the universe. Then all jealousies will disappear;
of whom to be jealous ? Of myself ? Then all
bad feelings disappear. Against whom shall I
have this bad feeling ? Against myself ? There
is none in the universe but me . . . kill out
this differentiation, kill out this superstition
that there are many. ' He who, in this world of
many, sees that One; he who, in this mass of
insentiency, sees that One Sentient Being; he
who in this world of shadow, catches that Real-
ity, unto him belongs eternal peace, unto none
else, unto none else.' '
We all have some ear for this monistic
music: it elevates and reassures. We all have
at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when
154
THE ONE AND THE MANY
our idealists recite their arguments for the Ab-
solute, saying that the slightest union admitted
anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness
with it, and that the slightest separation ad-
mitted anywhere logically carries disunion
remediless and complete, I cannot help sus-
pecting that the palpable weak places in the
intellectual reasonings they use are protected
from their own criticism by a mystical feeling
that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must
somehow at any cost be true. Oneness over-
comes moral separateness at any rate. In the
passion of love we have the mystic germ of
what might mean a total union of all sentient
life. This mystical germ wakes up in us on
hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges
their authority, and assigns to intellectual con-
siderations a secondary place.
I will dwell no longer on these religious and
moral aspects of the question in this lecture.
When I come to my final lecture there will be
something more to say.
Leave then out of consideration for the mo-
ment the authority which mystical insights may
155
PRAGMATISM
be conjectured eventually to possess; treat the
problem of the One and the Many in a purely
intellectual way; and we see clearly enough
where pragmatism stands. With her criterion
of the practical differences that theories make,
we see that she must equally abjure absolute
monism and absolute pluralism. The world is
One just so far as its parts hang together by
any definite connexion. It is many just so far
as any definite connexion fails to obtain. And
finally it is growing more and more unified
by those systems of connexion at least which
human energy keeps framing as time goes on.
It is possible to imagine alternative universes
to the one we know, in which the most various
grades and types of union should be embodied.
Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a
world of mere withness, of which the parts were
only strung together by the conjunction 'and.'
Such a universe is even now the collection of
our several inner lives. The spaces and times
of your imagination, the objects and events of
your day-dreams are not only more or less in-
coherent inter se, but are wholly out of definite
156
THE ONE AND THE MANY
relation with the similar contents of any one
else's mind. Our various reveries now as we
sit here compenetrate each other idly without
influencing or interfering. They coexist, but in
no order and in no receptacle, being the nearest
approach to an absolute 'many' that we can
conceive. We can not even imagine any reason
why they should be known all together, and
we can imagine even less, if they were known
together, how they could be known as one
systematic whole.
But add our sensations and bodily actions,
and the union mounts to a much higher grade.
Our audita et visa and our acts fall into those
receptacles of time and space in which each event
finds its date and place. They form 'things'
and are of ' kinds ' too, and can be classed. Yet
we can imagine a world of things and of kinds
in which the causal interactions with which we
are so familiar should not exist. Everything
there might be inert towards everything else,
and refuse to propagate its influence. Or gross
mechanical influences might pass, but no chem-
ical action. Such worlds would be far less uni-
157
PRAGMATISM
fied than ours. Again there might be complete
physico-chemical interaction, but no minds ; or
minds, but altogether private ones, with no so-
cial life; or social life limited to acquaintance,
but no love; or love, but no customs or institu-
tions that should systematize it. No one of these
grades of universe would be absolutely irrational
or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear
when looked at from the higher grades. For
instance, if our minds should ever become ' tele-
pathically' connected, so that we knew immedi-
ately, or could under certain conditions know
immediately, each what the other was think-
ing, the world we now live in would appear to
the thinkers in that world to have been of an
inferior grade.
With the whole of past eternity open for our
conjectures to range in, it may be lawful to
wonder whether the various kinds of union now
realized in the universe that we inhabit may
not possibly have been successively evolved
after the fashion in which we now see human
systems evolving in consequence of human
needs. If such an hypothesis were legitimate,
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THE ONE AND THE MANY
total oneness would appear at the end of things
rather than at their origin. In other words the
notion of the 'Absolute' would have to be re-
placed by that of the 'Ultimate.' The two no-
tions would have the same content — the maxi-
mally unified content of fact, namely — but their
time- relations would be positively reversed.1
After discussing the unity of the universe in
this pragmatic way, you ought to see why I
said in my second lecture, borrowing the word
from my friend G. Papini, that pragmatism
tends to unstiffen all our theories. The world's
oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly
only, and as if any one who questioned it must
be an idiot. The temper of monists has been so
vehement, as almost at times to be convulsive ;
and this way of holding a doctrine does not
easily go with reasonable discussion and the
drawing of distinctions. The theory of the Ab-
solute, in particular, has had to be an article of
faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively.
The One and All, first in the order of being and
1 Compare on the Ultimate, Mr. Schiller's essay "Activity and Sub-
stance," in his book entitled Humanism, p. 204.
159
PRAGMATISM
of knowing, logically necessary itself, and unit-
ing all lesser things in the bonds of mutual
necessity, how could it allow of any mitigation
of its inner rigidity? The slightest suspicion of
pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independ-
ence of any one of its parts from the control
of the totality would ruin it. Absolute unity
brooks no degrees, — as well might you claim
absolute purity for a glass of water because it
contains but a single little cholera-germ. The
independence, however infinitesimal, of a part,
however small, would be to the Absolute as
fatal as a cholera-germ.
Pluralism on the other hand has no need of
this dogmatic rigoristic temper. Provided you
grant some separation among things, some tre-
mor of independence, some free play of parts
on one another, some real novelty or chance,
however minute, she is amply satisfied, and will
allow you any amount, however great, of real
union. How much of union there may be is a
question that she thinks can only be decided
empirically. The amount may be enormous,
colossal; but absolute monism is shattered if,
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THE ONE AND THE MANY
along with all the union, there has to be granted
the slightest modicum, the most incipient nas-
cency, or the most residual trace, of a separa-
tion that is not 'overcome.'
Pragmatism, pending the final empirical
ascertainment of just what the balance of union
and disunion among things may be, must ob-
viously range herself upon the pluralistic side.
Some day, she admits, even total union, with
one knower, one origin, and a universe con-
solidated in every conceivable way, may turn
out to be the most acceptable of all hypotheses.
Meanwhile the opposite hypothesis, of a world
imperfectly unified still, and perhaps always
to remain so, must be sincerely entertained.
This latter hypothesis is pluralism's doctrine.
Since absolute monism forbids its being even
considered seriously, branding it as irrational
from the start, it is clear that pragmatism must
turn its back on absolute monism, and follow
pluralism's more empirical path.
This leaves us with the common -sense
world, in which we find things partly joined
and partly disjoined. * Things,' then, and their
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PRAGMATISM
' conjunctions ' — what do such words mean,
pragmatically handled? In my next lecture,
I will apply the pragmatic method to the stage
of philosophizing known as Common Sense.
V
PRAGMATISM AND COMMON SENSE
LECTURE V
PRAGMATISM AND COMMON SENSE
IN the last lecture we turned ourselves from
the usual way of talking of the universe's one-
ness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness,
towards a study of the special kinds of union
which the universe enfolds. We found many of
these to coexist with kinds of separation equally
real. ' How far am I verified? ' is the question
which each kind of union and each kind of
separation asks us here, so as good pragma-
tists we have to turn our face towards experi-
ence, towards 'facts.'
Absolute oneness remains, but only as an
hypothesis, and that hypothesis is reduced now-
adays to that of an omniscient knower who
sees all things without exception as forming one
single systematic fact. But the knower in ques-
tion may still be conceived either as an Abso-
lute or as an Ultimate; and over against the
hypothesis of him in either form the counter-
hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge
that ever was or will be still contains some
165
PRAGMATISM
ignorance, may be legitimately held. Some bits
of information always may escape.
This is the hypothesis of noetic pluralism,
which monists consider so absurd. Since we
are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic
monism, until the facts shall have tipped the
beam, we find that our pragmatism, tho orig-
inally nothing but a method, has forced us
to be friendly to the pluralistic view. It may
be that some parts of the world are connected
so loosely with some other parts as to be strung
along by nothing but the copula and. They
might even come and go without those other
parts suffering any internal change. This
pluralistic view, of a world of additive consti-
tution, is one that pragmatism is unable to
rule out from serious consideration. But this
view leads one to the farther hypothesis that
the actual world, instead of being complete
'eternally/ as the monists assure us, may be
eternally incomplete, and at all times subject
to addition or liable to loss.
It is at any rate incomplete in one respect,
and flagrantly so. The very fact that we de-
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COMMON SENSE
bate this question shows that our knowledge
is incomplete at present and subject to addi-
tion. In respect of the knowledge it contains
the world does genuinely change and grow.
Some general remarks on the way in which our
knowledge completes itself — when it does com-
plete itself — will lead us very conveniently into
our subject for this lecture, which is ' Common
Sense.'
To begin with, our knowledge grows in
spots. The spots may be large or small, but
the knowledge never grows all over : some old
knowledge always remains what it was. Your
knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is
growing now. Later, its growth may involve
considerable modification of opinions which
you previously held to be true. But such modi-
fications are apt to be gradual. To take the
nearest possible example, consider these lec-
tures of mine. What you first gain from them
is probably a small amount of new informa-
tion, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or
points of view. But while these special ideas
are being added, the rest of your knowledge
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PRAGMATISM
stands still, and only gradually will you 'line
up' your previous opinions with the novelties
I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight
degree their mass.
You listen to me now, I suppose, with cer-
tain prepossessions as to my competency, and
these affect your reception of what I say, but
were I suddenly to break off lecturing, and
to begin to sing ' We won't go home till morn-
ing' in a rich baritone voice, not only would
that new fact be added to your stock, but it
would oblige you to define me differently, and
that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic
philosophy, and in general bring about a re-
arrangement of a number of your ideas. Your
mind in such processes is strained, and some-
times painfully so, between its older beliefs
and the novelties which experience brings
along.
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like
grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let
them spread as little as possible: we keep
unaltered as much of our old knowledge,
as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as
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COMMON SENSE
we can. We patch and tinker more than we
renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the
ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what
absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co-oper-
ates; and in the new equilibrium in which
each step forward in the process of learning
terminates, it happens relatively seldom that
the new fact is added raw. More usually it is
embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed
down in the sauce of the old.
New truths thus are resultants of new
experiences and of old truths combined and
mutually modifying one another. And since
this is the case in the changes of opinion of to-
day, there is no reason to assume that it has
not been so at all times. It follows that very
ancient modes of thought may have survived
through all the later changes in men's opinions.
The most primitive ways of thinking may not
yet be wholly expunged. Like our five fingers,
our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal append-
age, or our other 'vestigial* peculiarities, they
may remain as indelible tokens of events in
our race-history. Our ancestors may at certain
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PRAGMATISM
moments have struck into ways of thinking
which they might conceivably not have found.
But once they did so, and after the fact, the
inheritance continues. When you begin a
piece of music in a certain key, you must
keep the key to the end. You may alter your
house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the
first architect persists — you can make great
changes, but you can not change a Gothic
church into a Doric temple. You may rinse
and rinse the bottle, but you can't get the taste
of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it
wholly out.
My thesis now is this, that our fundamental
ways of thinking about things are discoveries
of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have
been able to preserve themselves throughout the
experience of all subsequent time. They form
one great stage of equilibrium in the human
mind's development, the stage of common
sense. Other stages have grafted themselves
upon this stage, but have never succeeded in
displacing it. Let us consider this common-
sense stage first, as if it might be final.
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COMMON SENSE
In practical talk, a man's common sense
means his good judgment, his freedom from
excentricity, his gumption, to use the vernacu-
lar word. In philosophy it means something
entirely different, it means his use of certain
intellectual forms or categories of thought.
Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our
organization would have led to our using quite
different modes from these of apprehending
our experiences. It might be too (we can not
dogmatically deny this) that such categories,
unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved
on the whole as serviceable for handling our
experiences mentally as those which we actu-
ally use.
If this sounds paradoxical to any one, let
him think of analytical geometry. The identi-
cal figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic
relations were defined by Descartes by the
relations of their points to adventitious co-ordi-
nates, the result being an absolutely different
and vastly more potent way of handling curves.
All our conceptions are what the Germans
call Denkmittel, means by which we handle
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PRAGMATISM
facts by thinking them. Experience merely as
such doesn't come ticketed and labelled, we
have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks
of it as being in its first intention a gewuhl der
erscheinungen, a rhapsodic der wahrnehm-
ungen, a mere motley which we have to unify by
our wits. What we usually do is first to frame
some system of concepts mentally classified,
serialized, or connected in some intellectual
way, and then to use this as a tally by which
we 'keep tab' on the impressions that present
themselves. When each is referred to some
possible place in the conceptual system, it is
thereby 'understood.' This notion of parallel
* manifolds ' with their elements standing recip-
rocally in 'one-to-one relations,' is proving
so convenient nowadays in mathematics and
logic as to supersede more and more the older
classificatory conceptions. There are many
conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense
manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-
one relation for your sense-impressions any-
where among the concepts, and in so far forth
you rationalize the impressions. But obviously
172
COMMON SENSE
you can rationalize them by using various con-
ceptual systems.
The old common-sense way of rationaliz-
ing them is by a set of concepts of which the
most important are these:
Thing;
The same or different;
Kinds;
Minds;
Bodies;
One Time;
One Space;
Subjects and attributes;
Causal influences;
The fancied;
The real.
We are now so familiar with the order that
these notions have woven for us out of the ever-
lasting weather of our perceptions that we find
it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine
the perceptions follow when taken by them-
selves. The word weather is a good one to use
here. In Boston, for example, the weather has
almost no routine, the only law being that if
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PRAGMATISM
you have had any weather for two days, you
will probably but not certainly have another
weather on the third. Weather-experience as
it thus comes to Boston is discontinuous, and
chaotic. In point of temperature, of wind, rain
or sunshine, it may change three times a day.
But the Washington weather-bureau intellect-
ualizes this disorder by making each success-
ive bit of Boston weather episodic. It refers it
to its place and moment in a continental cy-
clone, on the history of which the local changes
everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon
a cord.
Now it seems almost certain that young chil-
dren and the inferior animals take all their
experiences very much as uninstructedBoston-
ians take their weather. They know no more
of time, or space, as world-receptacles, or of
permanent subjects and changing predicates,
or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or things,
than our common people know of continental
cyclones. A baby's rattle drops out of his hand,
but the baby looks not for it. It has 'gone out'
for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it
174
COMMON SENSE
comes back, when you replace it in his hand,
as the flame comes back when relit. The idea
of its being a 'thing,' whose permanent exist-
ence by itself he might interpolate between its
successive apparitions has evidently not oc-
curred to him. It is the same with dogs. Out
of sight, out of mind, with them. It is pretty
evident that they have no general tendency to
interpolate * things.' Let me quote here a pas-
sage from my colleague G. Santay ana's book.
"If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly,
sees his master arriving after a long absence
. . . the poor brute asks for no reason why
his master went, why he has come again, why
he should be loved, or why presently while
lying at his feet you forget him and begin to
grunt and dream of the chase — all that is an
utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such ex-
perience has variety, scenery, and a certain
vital rhythm; its story might be told in dithy-
rambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration;
every event is providential, every act unpre-
meditated . Absolute freedom and absolute help-
lessness have met together: you depend wholly
175
PRAGMATISM
on divine favor, yet that unfathomable agency
is not distinguishable from your own life.
. . . [But] the figures even of that disordered
drama have their exits and their entrances;
and their cues can be gradually discovered
by a being capable of fixing his attention
and retaining the order of events. ... In
proportion as such understanding advances,
each moment of experience becomes conse-
quential and prophetic of the rest. The calm
places in life are filled with power and its
spasms with resource. No emotion can over-
whelm the mind, for of none is the basis or
issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it
altogether, because it sees beyond. Means can
be looked for to escape from the worst predica-
ment; and whereas each moment had been
formerly filled with nothing but its own adven-
tures and surprised emotion, each now makes
room for the lesson of what went before and
surmises what may be the plot of the whole." *
Even to-day science and philosophy are still
laboriously trying to part fancies from realities
1 The Life of Reason : Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p. 59.
176
COMMON SENSE
in our experience; and in primitive times they
made only the most incipient distinctions in
this line. Men believed whatever they thought
with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams
with their realities inextricably. The categories
of ' thought ' and * things ' are indispensable here
— instead of being realities we now call certain
experiences only ' thoughts.' There is not a cate-
gory, among those enumerated, of which we
may not imagine the use to have thus origi-
nated historically and only gradually spread.
That one Time which we all believe in and
in which each event has its definite date, that
one Space in which each thing has its position,
these abstract notions unify the world incom-
parably; but in their finished shape as con-
cepts how different they are from the loose un-
ordered time-and-space experiences of natural
men! Everything that happens to us brings its
own duration and extension, and both are
vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more' that
runs into the duration and extension of the
next thing that comes. But we soon lose all
our definite bearings; and not only do our
177
PRAGMATISM
children make no distinction between yesterday
and the day before yesterday, the whole past
being churned up together, but we adults still
do so whenever the times are large. It is the
same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly
see the relation of London, Constantinople,
and Pekin to the place where I am; in reality
I utterly fail to feel the facts which the map
symbolizes. The directions and distances are
vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space and
cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions
that Kant said they were, are constructions as
patently artificial as any that science can show.
The great majority of the human race never
use these notions, but live in plural times and
spaces, interpenetrant and durcheinander.
Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing
and its various ' appearances ' and 'alterations';
the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind'
used finally as a 'predicate,' of which the thing
remains the 'subject' — what a straightening
of the tangle of our experience's immediate
flux and sensible variety does this list of terms
suggest! And it is only the smallest part of his
178
COMMON SENSE
experience's flux that any one actually does
straighten out by applying to it these con-
ceptual instruments. Out of them all our lowest
ancestors probably used only, and then most
vaguely and inaccurately, the notion of 'the
same again.' But even then if you had asked
them whether the same were a * thing' that
had endured throughout the unseen interval,
they would probably have been at a loss, and
would have said that they had never asked that
question, or considered matters in that light.
Kinds, and sameness of kind — what colos-
sally useful denkmittel for finding our way
among the many! The manyness might con-
ceivably have been absolute. Experiences
might have all been singulars, no one of them
occurring twice. In such a world logic would
have had no application; for kind and same-
ness of kind are logic's only instruments. Once
we know that whatever is of a kind is also of
that kind's kind, we can travel through the
universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes
surely never use these abstractions, and civil-
ized men use them in most various amounts.
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PRAGMATISM
Causal influence, again! This, if anything,
seems to have been an antediluvian concep-
tion; for we find primitive men thinking that
almost everything is significant and can exert
influence of some sort. The search for the more
definite influences seems to have started in the
question: "Who, or what, is to blame?" —
for any illness, namely, or disaster, or untoward
thing. From this centre the search for causal
influences has spread. Hume and ' Science' to-
gether have tried to eliminate the whole notion
of influence, substituting the entirely different
denkmittel of 'law.' But law is a comparatively
recent invention, and influence reigns supreme
in the older realm of common sense.
The 'possible,' as something less than the
actual and more than the wholly unreal, is
another of these magisterial notions of com-
mon sense. Criticise them as you may, they
persist; and we fly back to them the moment
critical pressure is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in
the substantial or metaphysical sense — no one
escapes subjection to those forms of thought.
In practice, the common-sense denkmittel are
180
COMMON SENSE
uniformly victorious. Every one, however in-
structed, still thinks of a 'thing' in the com-
mon-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject
that 'supports' its attributes interchangeably.
No one stably or sincerely uses the more crit-
ical notion, of a group of sense-qualities united
by a law. With these categories in our hand,
we make our plans and plot together, and
connect all the remoter parts of experience
with what lies before our eyes. Our later and
more critical philosophies are mere fads and
fancies compared with this natural mother-
tongue of thought.
Common sense appears thus as a perfectly
definite stage in our understanding of things,
a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily
successful way the purposes for which we
think. 'Things' do exist, even when we do
not see them. Their 'kinds' also exist. Their
' qualities ' are what they act by, and are what
we act on; and these also exist. These lamps
shed their quality of light on every object in
this room. We intercept it on its way when-
ever we hold up an opaque screen. It is the
181
PRAGMATISM
very sound that my lips emit that travels into
your ears. It is the sensible heat of the fire
that migrates into the water in which we boil
an egg; and we can change the heat into cool-
ness by dropping in a lump of ice. At this
stage of philosophy all non-European men
without exception have remained. It suffices
for all the necessary practical ends of life;
and, among our race even, it is only the highly
sophisticated specimens, the minds debauched
by learning, as Berkeley calls them, who have
ever even suspected common sense of not
being absolutely true.
But when we look back, and speculate as to
how the common-sense categories may have
achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason
appears why it may not have been by a pro-
cess just like that by which the conceptions due
to Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved
their similar triumphs in more recent times.
In other words, they may have been success-
fully discovered by prehistoric geniuses whose
names the night of antiquity has covered up;
they may have been verified by the immediate
182
COMMON SENSE
facts of experience which they first fitted;
and then from fact .to fact and from man to
man they may have spread, until all language
rested on them and we are now incapable of
thinking naturally in any other terms. Such
a view would only follow the rule that has
proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the
vast and remote to conform to the laws of
formation that we can observe at work in the
small and near.
For all utilitarian practical purposes these
conceptions amply suffice ; but that they began
at special points of discovery and only gradu-
ally spread from one thing to another, seems
proved by the exceedingly dubious limits of their
application to-day. We assume for certain
purposes one * objective' Time that aequabili-
ter fluit, but we don't livingly believe in or
realize any such equally-flowing time. * Space'
is a less vague notion; but 'things,' what are
they? Is a constellation properly a thing? or
an army-? or is an ens rationis such as space or
justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and
blade are changed the ' same ' ? Is the * change-
183
PRAGMATISM
ling/ whom Locke so seriously discusses, of
the human ' kind ' ? Is * telepathy ' a ' fancy ' or
a 'fact'? The moment you pass beyond the
practical use of these categories (a use usually
suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of
the special case) to a merely curious or specu-
lative way of thinking, you find it impossible
to say within just what limits of fact any one
of them shall apply.
The peripatetic philosophy, obeying ration-
alist propensities, has tried to eternalize the
common-sense categories by treating them very
technically and articulately. A 'thing' for in-
stance is a being, or ens. An ens is a subject
in which qualities ' inhere.' A subject is a sub-
stance. Substances are of kinds, and kinds
are definite in number, and discrete. These
distinctions are fundamental and eternal.
As terms of discourse they are indeed magni-
ficently useful, but what they mean, apart from
their use in steering our discourse to profitable
issues, does not appear. If you ask a scholastic
philosopher what a substance may be in itself,
apart from its being the support of attributes,
184
COMMON SENSE
he simply says that your intellect knows per-
fectly what the word means.
But what the intellect knows clearly is only
the word itself and its steering function. So it
comes about that intellects sibi permissi, intel-
lects only curious and idle, have forsaken the
common-sense level for what in general terms
may be called the * critical' level of thought.
Not merely such intellects either — your Humes
and Berkeleys and Hegels; but practical ob-
servers of facts, your Galileos, Daltons, Fara-
days, have found it impossible to treat the
naifs sense-termini of common sense as ulti-
mately real. As common sense interpolates
her constant ' things ' between our intermittent
sensations, so science extrapolates her world
of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether,
her magnetic fields, and the like, beyond the
common-sense world. The 'things' are now
invisible impalpable things ; and the old visible
common-sense things are supposed to result
from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else
the whole naif conception of thing gets super-
seded, and a thing's name is interpreted as
185
PRAGMATISM
denoting only the law or regel der verbindung
by which certain of our sensations habitually
succeed or coexist.
Science and critical philosophy thus burst
the bounds of common sense. With science
naif realism ceases: 'Secondary' qualities be-
come unreal; primary ones alone remain.
With critical philosophy, havoc is made of
everything. The common-sense categories one
and all cease to represent anything in the way
of being; they are but sublime tricks of human
thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment
in the midst of sensation's irremediable flow.
But the scientific tendency in critical thought,
tho inspired at first by purely intellectual mo-
tives, has opened an entirely unexpected range
of practical utilities to our astonished view.
Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate
artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with
new medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and
Faraday have endowed us with the New York
subway and with Marconi telegrams. The
hypothetical things that such men have in-
vented, defined as they have defined them, are
186
COMMON SENSE
showing an extraordinary fertility in conse-
quences verifiable by sense. Our logic can de-
duce from them a consequence due under
certain conditions, we can then bring about
the conditions, and presto, the consequence is
there before our eyes. The scope of the prac-
tical control of nature newly put into our hand
by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the
scope of the old control grounded on common
sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that
no one can trace the limit; one may even fear
that the being of man may be crushed by his
own powers, that his fixed nature as an organ-
ism may not prove adequate to stand the strain
of the ever increasingly tremendous functions,
almost divine creative functions, which his
intellect will more and more enable him to
wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child
in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and
who can not turn it off.
The philosophic stage of criticism, much more
thorough in its negations than the scientific
stage, so far gives us no new range of practical
power. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel,
187
PRAGMATISM
have all been utterly sterile, so far as shedding
any light on the details of nature goes, and I
can think of no invention or discovery that
can be directly traced to anything in their pe-
culiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's tar-
water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had
their respective philosophic tenets anything
to do. The satisfactions they yield to their
disciples are intellectual, not practical; and
even then we have to confess that there is
a large minus-side to the account.
There are thus at least three well-character-
ized levels, stages or types of thought about the
world we live in, and the notions of one stage
have one kind of merit, those of another stage
another kind. It is impossible, however, to
say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely
more true than any other. Common sense is
the more consolidated stage, because it got its
innings first, and made all language into its
ally. Whether it or science be the more august
stage may be left to private judgment. But
neither consolidation nor augustness are de-
cisive marks of truth. If common sense were
188
COMMON SENSE
true, why should science have had to brand
the secondary qualities, to which our world
owes all its living interest, as false, and to in-
vent an invisible world of points and curves,
and mathematical equations instead? Why
should it have needed to transform causes and
activities into laws of * functional variation'?
Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's
college-trained younger sister, seek to stereo-
type the forms the human family had always
talked with, to make them definite and fix
them for eternity. Substantial forms (in other
words our secondary qualities) hardly out-
lasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were
already tired of them then; and Galileo, and
Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,' gave
them only a little later their coup de grace.
But now if the new kinds of scientific ' thing,'
the corpuscular and etheric world, were es-
sentially more 'true,' why should they have
excited so much criticism within the body of
science itself? Scientific logicians are saying
on every hand that these entities and their
determinations, however definitely conceived,
189
PRAGMATISM
should not be held for literally real. It is as if
they existed; but in reality they are like co-or-
dinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts
for taking us from one part to another of ex-
perience's flux. We can cipher fruitfully with
them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must
not be their dupes.
There is no ringing conclusion possible when
we compare these types of thinking, with a
view to telling which is the more absolutely
true. Their naturalness, their intellectual eco-
nomy, their fruitfulness for practice, all start up
as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result
we get confused. Common sense is better for
one sphere of life, science for another, philo-
sophic criticism for a third ; but whether either
be truer absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just
now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are
witnessing a curious reversion to the common
sense way of looking at physical nature, in the
philosophy of science favored by such men as
Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to
these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any
other in the sense of being a more literal copy
190
COMMON SENSE
of reality. They are all but ways of talking on
our part, to be compared solely from the point
of view of their use. The only literally true
thing is reality ; and the only reality we know
is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux
of our sensations and emotions as they pass.
'Energy' is the collective name (according to
Ostwald) for the sensations just as they pre-
sent themselves (the movement, heat, mag-
netic pull, or light, or whatever it may be)
when they are measured in certain ways. So
measuring them, we are enabled to describe
the correlated changes which they show us, in
formulas matchless for their simplicity and
fruitfulness for human use. They are sove-
reign triumphs of economy in thought.
No one can fail to admire the 'energetic'
philosophy. But the hypersensible entities,
the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own
with most physicists and chemists, in spite of
its appeal. It seems too economical to be all-
sufficient. Profusion, not economy, may after
all be reality's key-note.
I am dealing here with highly technical
191
PRAGMATISM
matters, hardly suitable for popular lecturing,
and in which my own competence is small,.
All the better for my conclusion, however,
which at this point is this. The whole notion
of truth, which naturally and without reflex-
ion we assume to mean the simple duplication
by the mind of a ready-made and given reality,
proves hard to understand clearly. There is
no simple test available for adjudicating off-
hand between the divers types of thought that
claim to possess it. Common sense, common
science or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical
science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic
philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some
regard and leave some dissatisfaction. It is
evident that the conflict of these so widely
differing systems obliges us to overhaul the
very idea of truth, for at present we have no
definite notion of what the word may mean.
I shall face that task in my next lecture, and
will add but a few words, in finishing the
present one.
There are only two points that I wish you to
retain from the present lecture. The first one
192
COMMON SENSE
relates to common sense. We have seen reason
to suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their
being so venerable, of their being so univer-x
sally used and built into the very structure of
language, its categories may after all be only
a collection of extraordinarily successful hypo-
theses (historically discovered or invented by
single men, but gradually communicated, and
used by everybody) by which our forefathers
have from time immemorial unified and
straightened the discontinuity of their imme-
diate experiences, and put themselves into an
equilibrium with the surface of nature so satis-
factory for ordinary practical purposes that it
certainly would have lasted forever, but for
the excessive intellectual vivacity of Democri-
tus, Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley, and of
other excentric geniuses whom the example of
such men inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this
suspicion about common sense.
The other point is this. . Ought not the exist-
ence of the various types of thinking which we
have reviewed, each so splendid for certain
purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither
193
PRAGMATISM
one of them able to support a claim of abso-
lute veracity, to awaken a presumption favor-
able to the pragmatistic view that all our theo-
ries are instrumental, are mental modes of
adaptation to reality, rather than revelations
or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted
world-enigma ? I expressed this view as clearly
as I could in the second of these lectures. Cer-
tainly the restlessness of the actual theoretic
situation, the value for some purposes of each
thought-level, and the inability of either to
expel the others decisively, suggest this prag-
matistic view, which I hope that the next lec-
tures may soon make entirely convincing. May
there not after all be a possible ambiguity in
truth?
VI
PRAGMATISM'S CONCEPTION OF
TRUTH
LECTURE VI
PRAGMATISM'S CONCEPTION OF
TRUTH
TYHEN Clerk-Maxwell was a child it is writ-
ten that he had a mania for having everything
explained to him, and that when people put
him off with vague verbal accounts of any phe-
nomenon he would interrupt them impatiently
by saying, ' Yes ; but I want you to tell me the
particular go of it!' Had his question been
about truth, only a pragmatist could have told
him the particular go of it. I believe that our
contemporary pragmatists, especially Messrs.
Schiller and Dewey, have given the only ten-
able account of this subject. It is a very tick-
lish subject, sending subtle rootlets into all
kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the
sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture.
But the Schiller-Dewey view of truth has been
so ferociously attacked by rationalistic phil-
osophers, and so abominably misunderstood,
that here, if anywhere, is the point where a
clear and simple statement should be made.
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PRAGMATISM
I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of
truth run through the classic stages of a theory's
career. First, you know, a new theory is at-
tacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be
true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it
is seen to be so important that its adversaries
claim that they themselves discovered it. Our
doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these
three stages, with symptoms of the second stage
having begun in certain quarters. I wish that
this lecture might help it beyond the first stage
in the eyes of many of you.
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a
property of certain of our ideas. It means their
'agreement,' as falsity means their disagree-
ment, with ' reality.' Pragmatists and intellect-
ualists both accept this definition as a matter
of course. They begin to quarrel only after the
question is raised as to what may precisely be
meant by the term 'agreement,' and what by
the term 'reality,' when reality is taken as
something for our ideas to agree with.
In answering these questions the pragma-
tists are more analytic and painstaking, the
198
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
intellectualists more offhand and irreflective.
The popular notion is that a true idea must
copy its reality. Like other popular views, this
one follows the analogy of the most usual ex-
perience. Our true ideas of sensible things do
indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and think
of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just
such a true picture or copy of its dial. But
your idea of its ' works ' (unless you are a clock-
maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes
muster, for it in no way clashes with the real-
ity. Even though it should shrink to the mere
word 'works/ that word still serves you truly;
and when you speak of the 'time-keeping
function' of the clock, or of its spring's 'elas-
ticity,' it is hard to see exactly what your ideas
can copy.
You perceive that there is a problem here.
Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their
object, what does agreement with that object
mean? Some idealists seem to say that they
are true whenever they are what God means
that we ought to think about that object.
Others hold the copy- view all through, and
199
PRAGMATISM
speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in
proportion as they approach to being copies
of the Absolute's eternal way of thinking.
These views,- you see, invite pragmatistic
discussion. But the great assumption of the
intellectualists is that truth means essentially
an inert static relation. When you've got your
true idea of anything, there's an end of the
matter. You're in possession; you know; you
have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are
where you ought to be mentally; you have
obeyed your categorical imperative; and no-
thing more need follow on that climax of your
rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in
stable equilibrium.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its
usual question. " Grant an idea or belief to be
true," it says, "what concrete difference will
its being true make in any one's actual life?
How will the truth be realized? What experi-
ences will be different from those which would
obtain if the belief were false? What, in short,
is the truth's cash- value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question,
200
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
it sees the answer : True ideas are those that we
can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify.
False ideas are those that we can not. That is
the practical difference it makes to us to have
true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of
truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.
This thesis is what I have to defend. The
truth of an idea is not a stagnant property
inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It
becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity
is in fact an event, a process: the process
namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication.
Its validity is the process of its valid-crfwm.
But what do the words verification and valid-
ation themselves pragmatically mean? They
again signify certain practical consequences
of the verified and validated idea. It is hard
to find any one phrase that characterizes
these consequences better than the ordinary
agreement-formula — just such consequences
being what we have in mind whenever we
say that our ideas 'agree' with reality. They
lead us, namely, through the acts and other
ideas which they instigate, into or up to,
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PRAGMATISM
or towards, other parts of experience with
which we feel all the while — such feeling be-
ing among our potentialities — that the original
ideas remain in agreement. The connexions
and transitions come to us from point to point
as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory.
This function of agreeable leading is what
we mean by an idea's verification. Such an
account is vague and it sounds at first quite
trivial, but it has results which it will take the
rest of my hour to explain.
Let me begin by reminding you of the fact
that the possession of true thoughts means
everywhere the possession of invaluable instru-
ments of action; and that our duty to gain
truth, so far from being a blank command from
out of the blue, or a 'stunt' self-imposed by
our intellect, can account for itself by excellent
practical reasons.
The importance to human life of having true
beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too
notorious. We live in a world of realities that
can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful.
202
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
Ideas that tell us which of them to expect
'count as the true ideas in all this primary
sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such
ideas is a primary human duty. The pos-
session of truth, so far from being here an
end in itself, is only a preliminary means
towards other vital satisfactions. If I am
lost in the woods and starved, and find what
looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost
importance that I should think of a human
habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and
follow it, I save myself. The true thought is
useful here because the house which is its ob-
ject is useful. The practical value of true ideas
is thus primarily derived from the practical
importance of their objects to us, Their-ob-
jects are, indeed, not important at all times.
I may on another occasion have no use for the
house; and then my idea of it, however veri-
fiable, will be practically irrelevant, and had
better remain latent. Yet since almost any
object may some day become temporarily
important, the advantage of having a general
stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true
203
PRAGMATISM
of merely possible situations, is obvious. We
store such extra truths away in our memories,
and with the overflow we fill our books of refer-
ence. Whenever such an extra truth becomes
practically relevant to one of our emergencies,
it passes from cold-storage to do work in the
world and our belief in it grows active. You
can say of it then either that 'it is useful be-
cause it is true' or that 'it is true because it is
useful.' Both these phrases mean exactly the
same thing, namely that here is an idea that
gets fulfilled and can be verified. True is the
name for whatever idea starts the verification-
process, useful is the name for its completed
function in experience. True ideas would never
have been singled out as such, would never
have acquired a class-name, least of all a name
suggesting value, unless they had been useful
from the outset in this way.
From this simple cue pragmatism gets her
general notion of truth as something essentially
bound up with the way in which one moment
in our experience may lead us towards other
moments which it will be worth while to have
204
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
been led to. Primarily, and on the common-
sense level, the truth of a state of mind means
this function of a leading that is worth while.
When a moment in our experience, of any kind
whatever, inspires us with a thought that is
true, that means that sooner or later we dip by
that thought's guidance into the particulars of
experience again and make advantageous con-
nexion with them. This is a vague enough
statement, but I beg you to retain it, for it is
essential.
Our experience mean while is all shot through
with regularities. One bit of it can warn us to
get ready for another bit, can 'intend' or be
'significant of that remoter object. The ob-
ject's advent is the significance's verification.
Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but
eventual verification, is manifestly incompat-
ible with waywardness on our part. Woe to
him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the
order which realities follow in his experience;
they will lead him nowhere or else make false
connexions.
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PRAGMATISM
By 'realities' or 'objects' here, we mean
either things of common sense, sensibly pre-
sent, or else common-sense relations, such as
dates, places, distances, kinds, activities. Fol-
lowing our mental image of a house along the-
cow-path, we actually come to see the house;
we get the image's full verification. Such
simply and fully verified leadings are certainly
the- originals and prototypes of the truth-process.
Experience offers indeed other forms of truth-
process, but they are all conceivable as being
primary verifications arrested, multiplied or
substituted one for another.
Take, for instance, yonder object on the
wall. You and I consider it to be a 'clock,'
altho no one of us has seen the hidden works
that make it one. We let our notion pass for
true without attempting to verify. If truths
mean verification-process essentially, ought we
then to call such unverified truths as this abort-
ive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly
large number of the truths we live by. Indirect
as well as direct verifications pass muster.
Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we
206
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
can go without eye-witnessing. Just as we here
assume Japan to exist without ever having
been there, because it works to do so, every-
thing we know conspiring with the belief, and
nothing interfering, so we assume that thing
to be a clock. We use it as a clock, regulating
the length of our lecture by it. The verifica-
tion of the assumption here means its leading
to no frustration or contradiction. Verifia&i/-
ity of wheels and weights and pendulum is as
good as verification. For one truth-process
completed there are a million in our lives that
function in this state of nascency. They turn
us towards direct verification; lead us into the
surroundings of the objects they envisage ; and
then, if everything runs on harmoniously, we
are so sure that verification is possible that
we omit it, and are usually justified by all
that happens.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on
a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs
'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just
as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses
them. But this all points to direct face-to-face
207
PRAGMATISM
verifications somewhere, without which the
fabric of truth collapses like a financial system
with no cash-basis whatever. You accept my
verification of one thing, I yours of another.
We trade on each other's truth. But beliefs
verified concretely by somebody are the posts
of the whole superstructure.
Another great reason — beside economy of
time — for waiving complete verification in
the usual business of life is that all things exist
in kinds and not singly. Our world is found
once for all to have that peculiarity. So that
when we have once directly verified our ideas
about one specimen of a kind, we consider our-
selves free to apply them to other specimens
without verification. A mind that habitually
discerns the kind of thing before it, and acts
by the law of the kind immediately, without
pausing to verify, will be a 'true' mind in
ninety-nine out of a hundred emergencies,
proved so by its conduct fitting everything it
meets, and getting no refutation.
Indirectly or only potentially verifying pro-
cesses may thus be true as well as full verifica-
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
tion-processes. They work as true processes
would work, give us the same advantages, and
claim our recognition for the same reasons.
All this on the common-sense level of matters
of fact, which we are alone considering.
But matters of fact are not our only stock
in trade. Relations among purely mental ideas
form another sphere where true and false be-
liefs obtain, and here the beliefs are absolute,
or unconditional. When they are true they
bear the name either of definitions or of prin-
ciples. It is either a principle or a definition
that 1 and 1 make 2, that 2 and 1 make 3, and
so on; that white differs less from gray than
it does from black; that when the cause begins
to act the effect also commences. Such pro-
positions hold of all possible ' ones, ' of all con-
ceivable 'whites' and * grays' and « causes.'
The objects here are mental objects. Their
relations are perceptually obvious at a glance,
and no sense-verification is necessary. More-
over, once true, always true, of those same
mental objects. Truth here has an 'eternal'
209
PRAGMATISM
character. If you can find a concrete thing any-
where that is 'one' or 'white' or 'gray' or an
'effect,' then your principles will everlastingly
apply to it. It is but a case of ascertaining
the kind, and then applying the law of its
kind to the particular object. You are sure
to get truth if you can but name the kind
rightly, for your mental relations hold good
of everything of that kind without exception.
If you then, nevertheless, failed to get truth
concretely, you would say that you had classed
your real objects wrojigly.
In this realm of mental relations, truth
again is an affair of leading. We relate one
abstract idea with another, framing in the
end great systems of logical and mathematical
truth, under the respective terms of which the
sensible facts of experience eventually arrange
themselves, so that our eternal truths hold
good of realities also. This marriage of fact
and theory is endlessly fertile. What we say
is here already true in advance of special veri-
fication, if we have subsumed our objects rightly.
Our ready-made ideal framework for all sorts
210
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
of possible objects follows from the very struc-
ture of our thinking. We can no more play
fast and loose with these abstract v relations
than we can do so with our sense-experiences.
They coerce us; we must treat them consis-
tently, whether or not we like the results. The
rules of addition apply to our debts as rigor-
ously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal
of TT, the ratio of the circumference to its dia-
meter, is predetermined ideally now, tho no
one may have computed it. If we should
ever need the figure in our dealings with an
actual circle we should need to have it given
rightly, calculated by the usual rules ; for it is
the same kind of truth that those rules else-
where calculate.
Between the coercions of the sensible order
and those of the ideal order, our mind is thus
wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree with
realities, be such realities concrete or abstract,
be they facts or be they principles, under
penalty of endless inconsistency and frustra-
tion.
So far, intellectualists can raise no protest.
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PRAGMATISM
They can only say that we have barely touched
he skin of the matter.
Realities mean, then, either concrete facts,
or abstract kinds of thing and relations per-
ceived intuitively between them. They fur-
thermore and thirdly mean, as things that
new ideas of ours must no less take account
ofv, 'the whole body of other truths already
in our possession. But what now does ' agree-
ment' with such threefold realities mean ? —
to use again the definition that is current,
Here it is that pragmatism and intellectual-
ism begin to part company. Primarily, no
doubt, to agree means to copy, but we saw
that the mere word 'clock' would do instead
of a mental picture of its works, and that of
many realities our ideas can only be symbols
and not copies. 'Past time,' 'power,' 'spon-
taneity,'— how can our mind copy such real-
ities ?
To 'agree' in the widest sense with a reality
can only mean to be guided either straight up to
it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
working touch with it as to handle either it or
something connected with it better than if we
disagreed. Better either intellectually or prac-
tically! And often agreement will only mean
the negative fact that nothing contradictory
from the quarter of that reality comes to inter-
fere with the way in which our ideas guide us
elsewhere. To copy a reality is, indeed, one
very important way of agreeing with it, but it
is far from being essential. The essential thing
is the process of being guided. Any idea that
helps us to deal, whether practically or in-
tellectually, with either the reality or its be-
longings, that doesn't entangle our progress
in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts
our life to the reality's whole setting, will agree
sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will
hold true of that reality.
Thus, names are just as 'true* or 'false' as
definite mental pictures are. They set up sim-
ilar verification-processes, and lead to fully
equivalent practical results,
v All human thinking gets discursified; we
exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifica-
213
PRAGMATISM
tions, get them from one another by means of
social intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally
built out, stored up, and made available for
every one. Hence, we must talk consistently
just as we must think consistently: for both
in talk and thought we deal with kinds.
Names are arbitrary, but once understood
they must be kept to. We mustn't now call
Abel 'Cain' or Cain 'Abel.' If we do, we un-
gear ourselves from the whole book of Genesis,
and from all its connexions with the universe
of speech and fact down to the present time.
We throw ourselves out of whatever truth that
entire system of speech and fact may embody.
The overwhelming majority of our true
ideas admit of no direct or face-to-face veri-
fication — those of past history, for example,
as of Cain and Abel. The stream of time can
be remounted only verbally, or verified indi-
rectly by the present prolongations or effects
of what the past harbored. Yet if they agree
with these verbalities and effects, we can know
that our ideas of the past are true. As true as
past time itself was, so true was Julius Csesar,
214
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
so true were antediluvian monsters, all in their
proper dates and settings. That past time"
itself was, is guaranteed by its coherence with
everything that's present. True as the present
is, the past was also.
Agreement thus turns out to be essentially
an affair of leading — leading that is useful
because it is into quarters that contain objects
that are important. True ideas lead us into
useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well
as directly up to useful sensible termini. They
lead to consistency, stability and flowing hu-
man intercourse. They lead away from excen-
tricity and isolation, from foiled and barren
thinking. The untrammelled flowing of the
leading-process, its general freedom from
clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect
verification; but all roads lead to Rome, and
in the end and eventually, all true processes
must lead to the face of directly verifying
sensible experiences somewhere, which some-
body's ideas have copied.
Such is the large loose way in which the
pragmatist interprets the word agreement. He
215
PRAGMATISM
treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover
any process of conduction from a present idea
to a future terminus, provided only it run
prosperously. It is only thus that 'scientific'
ideas, flying as they do beyond common sense,
can be said to agree with their realities. It is,
as I have already said, as if reality were made
of ether, atoms or electrons, but we must n't
think so literally. The term 'energy' does n't
even pretend to stand for anything 'object-
ive.' It is only a way of measuring the sur-
face of phenomena so as to string their changes
on a simple formula.
Yet in the choice of these man-made formu-
las we can not be capricious with impunity
any more than we can be capricious on the
common-sense practical level. We must find
a theory that will work; and that means some-
thing extremely difficult; for our theory must
mediate between all previous truths and cer-
tain new experiences. It must derange com-
mon sense and previous belief as little as
possible, and it must lead to some sensible
terminus or other that can be verified exactly.
216
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
To 'work' means both these things; and the
squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play
for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged
and controlled as nothing else is. Yet some-
times alternative theoretic formulas are equally
compatible with all tfie truths we know, and
then we choose between them for subjective
reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which
we are already partial; we follow * elegance'
or 'economy.' Clerk-Maxwell somewhere says
it would be 'poor scientific taste' to choose the
more complicated of two equally well-evi-
denced conceptions; and you will all agree
with him. Truth in science is what gives us
the maximum possible sum of satisfactions,
taste included, but consistency both with pre-
vious truth and with novel fact is always the
most imperious claimant.
I have led you through a very sandy desert.
But now, if I may be allowed so vulgar an ex-
pression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoa-
nut. Our rationalist critics here discharge their
batteries upon us, and to reply to them will take
217
PRAGMATISM
us out from all this dryness into full sight of
a momentous philosophical alternative.
Our account of truth is an account of truths
in the plural, of processes of leading, realized
in rebus, and having only this quality in com-
mon, that they pay. They pay by guiding us
into or towards some part of a system that dips
at numerous points into sense-percepts, which
we may copy mentally or not, but with which
at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce
vaguely designated as verification. Truth for
us is simply a collective name for verification-
processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc.,
are names for other processes connected with
life, and also pursued because it pays to pur-
sue them. Truth is made, just as health, wealth
and strength are made, in the course of experi-
ence.
Here rationalism is instantaneously up in
arms against us. I can imagine a rationalist to
talk as follows:
"Truth is not made," he will say; "it abso-
lutely obtains, being a unique relation that
does not wait upon any process, but shoots
218
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
<
straight over the head of experience, and hits
its reality every time. Our belief that yon thing
on the wall is a clock is true already, altho
no one in the whole history of the world should
verify it. The bare quality of standing in that
transcendent relation is what makes any
thought true that possesses it, whether or not
there be verification. You pragmatists put the
cart before the horse in making truth's being
reside in verification-processes. These are
merely signs of its being, merely our lame ways
of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas
already has possessed the wondrous quality.
The quality itself is timeless, like all essences
and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly,
as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy. It
can't be analyzed away into pragmatic con-
sequences."
The whole plausibility of this rationalist
tirade is due to the fact to which we have al-
ready paid so much attention. In our world,
namely, abounding as it does in things of simi-
lar kinds and similarly associated, one verifica-
tion serves for others of its kind, and one great
219
PRAGMATISM
use of knowing things is to be led not so much
to them as to their associates, especially to
human talk about them. The quality of truth,
obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then,
the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas
work better by their indirect or possible than
by their direct and actual verification. Truth
ante rem means only verifiability, then; or
else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of
treating the name of a concrete phenomenal
reality as an independent prior entity, and
placing it behind the reality as its explanation.
Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram
of Lessing's:
Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz,
"Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,
Dass grad' die Reichsten in der Welt,
Das meiste Geld besitzen ? "
Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle
'wealth* as something distinct from the facts
denoted by the man's being rich. It antedates
them; the facts become only a sort of second-
ary coincidence with the rich man's essential
nature.
220
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
In the case of 'wealth' we all see the fallacy.
We know that wealth is but a name for con-
crete processes that certain men's lives play
a part in, and not a natural excellence found in
Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie, but not in
the rest of us.
Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is
a name for processes, as digestion, circulation,
sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this in-
stance we are more inclined to think of it as a
principle and to say the man digests and sleeps
so well because he is so healthy.
With 'strength' we are, I think, more ration-
alistic still, and decidedly inclined to treat it
as an excellence pre-existing in the man and
explanatory of the herculean performances of
his muscles.
With 'truth' most people go over the border
entirely, and treat the rationalistic account as
self-evident. But really all these words in th
are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just
as much and as little as the other things do.
The scholastics, following Aristotle, made
much of the distinction between habit and act.
221
PRAGMATISM
Health in actu means, among other things,
good sleeping and digesting. But a healthy
man need not always be sleeping, or always
digesting, any more than a wealthy man need
be always handling money, or a strong man
always lifting weights. All such qualities sink
to the status of 'habits' between their times of
exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit
of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their
intervals of rest from their verifying activities.
But those activities are the root of the whole
matter, and the condition of there being any
habit to exist in the intervals.
' The true,9 to put it very briefly, is only the
expedient in the way of our thinking, just as
6 the right ' is only the expedient in the way of
our behaving. Expedient in almost anyfashion;
and expedient in the long run and on the whole
of course; for what meets expediently all the
experience in sight won't necessarily meet all
farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Ex-
perience, as we know, has ways of boiling over,
and making us correct our present formulas.
The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no far-
222
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
ther experience will ever alter, is that ideal van-
ishing-point towards which we imagine that all
our temporary truths will some day converge.
It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man,
and with the absolutely complete experience;
and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will
all be realized together. Meanwhile we have to
live to-day by what truth we can get to-day,
and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood.
Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aris-
totelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were
expedient for centuries, but human experience
has boiled over those limits, and we now call
these things only relatively true, or true within
those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they
are false; for we know that those limits were cas-
ual, and might have been transcended by past
theorists just as they are by present thinkers.
When new experiences lead to retrospective
judgments, using the past tense, what these
judgments utter was true, even tho no past
thinker had been led there. We live forwards,
a Danish thinker has said, but we understand
backwards. The present sheds a backward
223
PRAGMATISM
light on the world's previous processes. They
may have been truth-processes for the actors in
them. They are not so for one who knows the
later revelations of the story.
This regulative notion of a potential better
truth to be established later, possibly to be
established some day absolutely, and having
powers of retroactive legislation, turns its face,
like all pragmatist notions, towards concrete-
ness of fact, and towards the future. Like the
half-truths, the absolute truth will have to
be made, made as a relation incidental to the
growth of a mass of verification-experience,
to which the half -true ideas are all along con-
tributing their quota.
I have already insisted on the fact that
truth is made largely out of previous truths.
Men's beliefs at any time are so much experi-
ence funded. But the beliefs are themselves
parts of the sum total of the world's experience,
and become matter, therefore, for the next
day's funding operations. So far as reality
means experienceable reality, both it and the
truths men gain about it are everlastingly in
224
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
process of mutation — mutation towards a
definite goal, it may be — but still muta-
tion.
Mathematicians can solve problems with
two variables. On the Newtonian theory, for
instance, acceleration varies with distance, but
distance also varies with acceleration. In the
realm of truth-processes facts come independ-
ently and determine our beliefs provisionally.
But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as
they do so, they bring into sight or into exist-
ence new facts which re-determine the beliefs
accordingly. So the whole coil and ball of
truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double
influence. Truths emerge from facts ; but they
dip forward into facts again and add to them;
which facts again create or reveal new truth
(the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely.
The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true.
They simply are. Truth is the function of the
beliefs that start and terminate among them.
The case is like a snowball's growth, due as
it is to the distribution of the snow on the one
hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys
225
PRAGMATISM
on the other, with these factors co-determin-
ing each other incessantly.
The most fateful point of difference between
being a rationalist and being a pragmatist is
now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation,
and our psychological ascertainments of truth
are in mutation — so much rationalism will
allow; but never that either reality itself or
truth itself is mutable. Reality stands complete
and ready-made from all eternity, rationalism
insists, and the agreement of our ideas with it
is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of
which she has already told us. As that intrinsic
excellence, their truth has nothing to do with
our experiences. It adds nothing to the content
of experience. It makes no difference to reality
itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a reflex-
ion merely. It doesn't exist, it holds or ob-
tains, it belongs to another dimension from
that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in
short, to the epistemological dimension — and
with that big word rationalism closes the dis-
cussion.
226
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to
the future, so does rationalism here again face
backward to a past eternity. True to her invet-
erate habit, rationalism reverts to ' principles/
and thinks that when an abstraction once is
named, we own an oracular solution.
The tremendous pregnancy in the way of
consequences for life of this radical difference
of outlook will only become apparent in my
later lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this
lecture by showing that rationalism's sublim-
ity does not save it from inanity.
When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead
of accusing pragmatism of desecrating the
notion of truth, to define it themselves by
saying exactly what they understand by it,
the only positive attempts I can think of are
these two :
1. "Truth is the system of propositions
which have an unconditional claim to be re-
cognized as valid." l
2. Truth is a name for all those judgments
1 A. E. Taylor, Philosophical Review, vol. xiv, p. 288.
227
PRAGMATISM
which we find ourselves under obligation to
make by a kind of imperative duty.1
The first thing that strikes one in such de-
finitions is their unutterable triviality. They
are absolutely true, of course, but absolutely in-
significant until you handle them pragmatic-
ally. What do you mean by 'claim' here, and
what do you mean by 'duty'? As summary
names for the concrete reasons why thinking
in true ways is overwhelmingly expedient and
good for mortal men, it is all right to talk of
claims on reality's part to be agreed with, and
of obligations on our part to agree. We feel
both the claims and the obligations, and we
feel them for just those reasons.
But the rationalists who talk of claim and
obligation expressly say that they have nothing
to do with our practical interests or personal
reasons. Our reasons for agreeing are psycho-
logical facts, they say, relative to each thinker,
and to the accidents of his life. They are his
evidence merely, they are no part of the life of
1 H. Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, chapter on 'Die
Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.'
228
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
truth itself. That life transacts itself in a purely
logical or epistemological, as distinguished from
a psychological, dimension, and its claims ante-
date and exceed all personal motivations what-
soever. Tho neither man nor God should ever
ascertain truth, the word would still have to
be defined as that which ought to be ascer-
tained and recognized.
There never was a more exquisite example
of an idea abstracted from the concretes of
experience and then used to oppose and negate
what it was abstracted from.
Philosophy and common life abound in sim-
ilar instances. The 'sentimentalist fallacy' is
to shed tears over abstract justice and gener-
osity, beauty, etc., and never to know these
qualities when you meet them in the street,
because the circumstances make them vulgar.
Thus I read in the privately printed biography
of an eminently rationalistic mind: "It was
strange that with such admiration for beauty
in the abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm
for fine architecture, for beautiful painting, or
for flowers." And in almost the last philosophic
229
PRAGMATISM
work I have read, I find such passages as the
following: " Justice is ideal, solely ideal. Rea-
son conceives that it ought to exist, but ex-
perience shows that it can not. . . . Truth,
which ought to be, can not be. . . . Reason
is deformed by experience. As soon as reason
enters experience it becomes contrary to rea-
son."
The rationalist's fallacy here is exactly like
the sentimentalist's. Both extract a quality
from the muddy particulars of experience, and
find it so pure when extracted that they con-
trast it with each and all its muddy instances
as an opposite and higher nature. All the while
it is their nature. It is the nature of truths
to be validated, verified. It pays for our ideas
to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is
part of our general obligation to do what pays.
The payments true ideas bring are the sole why
of our duty to follow them. Identical whys exist
in the case of wealth and health.
Truth makes no other kind of claim and im-
poses no other kind of ought than health and
wealth do. All these claims are conditional;
230
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
the concrete benefits we gain are what we
mean by calling the pursuit a duty. In the case
of truth, untrue beliefs work as perniciously in
the long run as true beliefs work beneficially.
Talking abstractly, the quality 'true' may
thus be said to grow absolutely precious and
the quality 'untrue' absolutely damnable: the
one may be called good, the other bad, uncon-
ditionally. We ought to think the true, we
ought to shun the false, imperatively.
But if we treat all this abstraction literally
and oppose it to its mother soil in experience,
see what a preposterous position we work our-
selves into.
We can not then take a step forward in our
actual thinking. When shall I acknowledge
this truth and when that? Shall the acknow-
ledgment be loud ? — or silent ? If sometimes
loud, sometimes silent, which now ? When may
a truth go into cold-storage in the encyclo-
pedia? and when shall it come out for battle ?
Must I constantly be repeating the truth 'twice
two are four' because of its eternal claim on
recognition? or is it sometimes irrelevant?
231
PRAGMATISM
Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my
personal sins and blemishes, because I truly
have them ? — or may I sink and ignore them
in order to be a decent social unit, and not a
mass of morbid melancholy and apology ?
It is quite evident that our obligation to
acknowledge truth, so far from being uncon-
ditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth
with a big T, and in the singular, claims ab-
stractly to be recognized, of course; but con-
crete truths in the plural need be recognized
only when their recognition is expedient. A
truth must always be preferred to a falsehood
when both relate to the situation; but when
neither does, truth is as little of a duty as false-
hood. If you ask me what o'clock it is and
I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my
answer may indeed be true, but you don't see
why it is my duty to give it. A false address
would be as much to the purpose.
With this admission that there are conditions
that limit the application of the abstract im-
perative, the pragmatistic treatment of truth
sweeps back upon us in its fulness. Our duty
232
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in
a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.
When Berkeley had explained what people
meant by matter, people thought that he denied
matter's existence. When Messrs. Schiller
and Dew^ey now explain what people mean by
truth, they are accused of denying its existence.
These pragmatists destroy all objective stand-
ards, critics say, and put foolishness and wis-
dom on one level. A favorite formula for de-
scribing Mr. Schiller's doctrines and mine is
that we are persons who think that by saying
whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling
it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic require-
ment.
I leave it to you to judge whether this be not
an impudent slander. Pent in, as the pragma-
tist more than any one else sees himself to be,
between the whole body of funded truths
squeezed from the past and the coercions of the
world of sense about him, who so well as he
feels the immense pressure of objective control
under which our minds perform their opera-
tions ? If any one imagines that this law is lax,
233
PRAGMATISM
let him keep its commandment one day, says
Emerson. We have heard much of late of the
uses of the imagination in science. It is high
time to urge the use of a little imagination in
philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our
critics to read any but the silliest of possible
meanings into our statements is as discreditable
to their imaginations as anything I know in re-
cent philosophic history. Schiller says the true
is that which ' works.' Thereupon he is treated
as one who limits verification to the lowest
material utilities. Dewey says truth is what
gives 'satisfaction.' He is treated as one who
believes in calling everything true which, if it
were true, would be pleasant.
Our critics certainly need more imagination
of realities. I have honestly tried to stretch my
own imagination and to read the best possible
meaning into the rationalist conception, but
I have to confess that it still completely baffles
me. The notion of a reality calling on us to
'agree' with it, and that for no reasons, but
simply because its claim is 'unconditional' or
' transcendent,' is one that I can make neither
234
THE NOTION OF TRUTH
head nor tail of. I try to imagine myself as the
sole reality in the world, and then to imagine
what more I would 'claim' if I were allowed
to. If you suggest the possibility of my claim-
ing that a mind should come into being from
out of the void inane and stand and copy me,
I can indeed imagine what the copying might
mean, but I can conjure up no motive. What
good it would do me to be copied, or what
good it would do that mind to copy me, if
further consequences are expressly and in prin-
ciple ruled out as motives for the claim (as
they are by our rationalist authorities) I can
not fathom. When the Irishman's admirers
ran him along to the place of banquet in a
sedan chair with no bottom, he said, "Faith,
if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I might
as well have come on foot." So here: but for
the honor of the thing, I might as well have
remained uncopied. Copying is one genuine
mode of knowing (which for some strange
reason our contemporary transcendentalists
seem to be tumbling over each other to re-
pudiate) ; but when we get beyond copying,
235
PRAGMATISM
and fall back on unnamed forms of agreeing
that are expressly denied to be either copyings
or leadings or fittings, or any other processes
pragmatically definable, the what of the ' agree-
ment' claimed becomes as unintelligible as the
why of it. Neither content nor motive can be
imagined for it. It is an absolutely meaningless
abstraction.1
Surely in this field of truth it is the prag-
matists and not the rationalists who are the
more genuine defenders of the universe's
rationality.
1 I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long ago gave up the
whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with reality. Reality
according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and truth is founded
solely on our primal duty. This fantastic flight, together with Mr.
Joachim's candid confession of failure in his book The Nature of
Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when deal-
ing with this subject. Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic po-
sition under the head of what he calls ' Relativismus.' I can not discuss
his text here. Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter
is so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer.
VII
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
LECTURE VII
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
tY HAT hardens the fyeart of every one I ap-
proach with the view of truth sketched in my
last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe,
the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one
answer, determinate and complete, to the one
fixed enigma which the world is believed to
propound. For popular tradition, it is all the
better if the answer be .oracular, so as itself to
awaken wonder as an enigma of the second
order, veiling rather than revealing what its
profundities are supposed to contain. All the
great single-word answers to the world's rid-
dle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law,
Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic
Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw
the admiration that men have lavished on
them from this oracular role. By amateurs in
philosophy and professionals alike, the uni-
verse is represented as a queer sort of petri-
fied sphinx whose appeal to men consists in a
monotonous challenge to his divining powers.
239
PRAGMATISM
The Truth : what a perfect idol of the ration-
alistic mind! I read in an old letter — from
a gifted friend who died too young — these
words: "In everything, in science, art, morals
and religion, there must be one system that is
right and every other wrong." How character-
istic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of
youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a chal-
lenge and expect to find the system. It never
occurs to most of us even later that the ques-
tion 'what is the truth?' is no real question
(being irrelative to all conditions) and that the
whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from
the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful
summarizing phrase like the Latin Language
or the Law.
Common-law judges sometimes talk about
the law, and schoolmasters talk about the
latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers
think they mean entities pre-existent to the de-
cisions or to the words and syntax, determin-
ing them unequivocally and requiring them
to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflexion
makes us see that, instead of being principles
240
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
of this kind, both law and latin are results.
Distinctions between the lawful and the unlaw-
ful in conduct, or between the correct and in-
correct in speech, have grown up incidentally
among the interactions of men's experiences
in detail ; and in no other way do distinctions
between the true and the false in belief ever
grow up. Truth grafts itself on previous
truth, modifying it in the process, just as
idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law
on previous law. Given previous law and a
novel case, and the judge will twist them into
fresh law. Previous idiom; new slang or meta-
phor or oddity that hits the public taste ;-
and presto, a new idiom is made. Previous
truth; fresh facts: — and our mind finds a new
truth.
All the while, however, we pretend that the
eternal is unrolling, that the one previous jus-
tice, grammar or truth are simply fulgurating
and not being made. But imagine a youth in
the courtroom trying cases with his abstract
notion of * the ' law, or a censor of speech let
loose among the theatres with his idea of 'the'
241
PRAGMATISM
mother-tongue, or a professor setting up to
lecture on the actual universe with his ration-
alistic notion of 'the Truth' with a big T, and
what progress do they make? Truth, law,
and language fairly boil away from them at
the least touch of novel fact. These things make
themselves as we go. Our rights, wrongs, pro-
hibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, be-
liefs, are so many new creations that add
themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far
from being antecedent principles that animate
the process, law, language, truth are but ab-
stract names for its results.
Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen
to be man-made things. Mr. Schiller applies
the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name
of 'Humanism' for the doctrine that to an un-
ascertainable extent our truths are man-made
products too. Human motives sharpen all our
questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our
answers, all our formulas have a human twist.
This element is so inextricable in the products
that Mr. Schiller sometimes seems almost to
leave it an open question whether there be
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
anything else. "The world," he says, "is es-
sentially vXrj, it is what we make it. It is fruit-
less to define it by what it originally was or by
what it is apart from us ; it is what is made of
it. Hence. . . the world is plastic." * He adds
that we can learn the limits of the plasticity
only by trying, and that we ought to start as if
it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on
that assumption, and stopping only when we
are decisively rebuked.
This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost
statement of the humanist position, and it
has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to
defend the humanist position in this lecture, so
I will insinuate a few remarks at this point.
Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as any
one the presence of resisting factors in every
actual experience of truth-making, of which
the new-made special truth must take account,
and with which it has perforce to 'agree.' All
our truths are beliefs about 'Reality'; and in
any particular belief the reality acts as some-
thing independent, as a thing found, not manu-
1 Personal Idealism, p. 60.
243
PRAGMATISM
factured. Let me here recall a bit of my last
lecture.
' Reality9 is in general what truths have to
take account of; 1 and the first part of reality
from this point of view is the flux of our sensa-
tions. Sensations are forced upon us, coming
we 'know not whence. Over their nature, order
and quantity we have as good as no control.
They are neither true nor false ; they simply are .
It is only what we say about them, only the
names we give them, our theories of their source
and nature and remote relations, that may be
true or not.
The second part of reality, as something that
our beliefs must also obediently take account
of is the relations that obtain between our sensa-
tions or between their copies in our minds.
This part falls into two sub-parts: 1) the rela-
tions that are mutable and accidental, as those
of date and place; and 2) those that are fixed
and essential because they are grounded on the
inner natures of their terms. Both sorts of rela-
1 Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent
definition.
244
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
tionare matters of immediate perception. Both
are ' facts. ' But it is the latter kind of fact that
forms the more important sub-part of reality
for our theories of knowledge. Inner relations
namely are 'eternal/ are perceived whenever
their sensible terms are compared ; and of them
our thought — mathematical and logical thought
so-called — must eternally take account.
The third part of reality, additional to these
perceptions (tho largely based upon them), is
the previous truths of which every new inquiry
takes account. This third part is a much less
obdurately resisting factor: it often ends by
giving way. In speaking of these three por-
tions of reality as at all times controlling our
belief's formation, I am only reminding you of
what we heard in our last hour.
Now however fixed these elements of real-
ity may be, we still have a certain freedom in
our dealings with them. Take our sensations.
That they are is undoubtedly beyond our con-
trol; but which we attend to, note, and make
emphatic in our conclusions depends on our
own interests; and, according as we lay the
245
PRAGMATISM
emphasis here or there, quite different formu-
lations of truth result. We read the same facts
differently. 'Waterloo/ with the same fixed de-
tails, spells a 'victory' for an Englishman; for
a Frenchman it spells a 'defeat.' So, for an
optimist philosopher the universe spells victory,
for a pessimist, defeat.
What we say about reality thus depends on
the perspective into which we throw it. The
that of it is its own; but the what depends on
the which; and the which depends on us. Both
the sensational and the relational parts of real-
ity are dumb; they say absolutely nothing
about themselves. We it is who have to speak
for them. This dumbness of sensations has led
such intellectualists as T. H. Green and Ed-
ward Caird to shove them almost beyond the
pale of philosophic recognition, but pragma-
tists refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather
like a client who has given his case to a lawyer
and then has passively to listen in the court-
room to whatever account of his affairs, pleas-
ant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most
expedient to give.
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
Hence, even in the field of sensation, our
minds exert a certain arbitrary choice. By our
inclusions and omissions we trace the field's ex-
tent ; by our emphasis we mark its foreground
and its background; by our order we read it
in this direction or in that. We receive in short
the block of marble, but we carve the statue
ourselves.
This applies to the * eternal ' parts of reality
as well : we shufHe our perceptions of intrinsic
relation and arrange them just as freely. We
read them in, one serial order or another, class
them in this way or in that, treat one or the
other as more fundamental, until our beliefs
about them form those bodies of truth known
as logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in each
and all of which the form and order in which
the whole is cast is flagrantly man-made.
Thus, to say nothing of the new facts which
men add to the matter of reality by the acts of
their own lives, they have already impressed
their mental forms on that whole third of real-
ity which I have called * previous truths.' Every
hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of
247
PRAGMATISM
sensation and relation, to be truly taken ac-
count of; but the whole of our past dealings
with such facts is already funded in the previ-
ous truths. It is therefore only the smallest and
recentest fraction of the first two parts of real-
ity that comes to us without the human touch,
and that fraction has immediately to become
humanized in the sense of being squared, as-
similated, or in some way adapted, to the
humanized mass already there. As a matter
of fact we can hardly take in an impression at
all, in the absence of a preconception of what
impressions there may possibly be.
When we talk of reality * independent' of
human thinking, then, it seems a thing very
hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what
is just entering into experience and yet to be
named, or else to some imagined aboriginal
presence in experience, before any belief about
the presence had arisen, before any human con-
ception had been applied. It is what is abso-
lutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal
limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we
never grasp it; what we grasp is always some
248
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
substitute for it which previous human think-
ing has peptonized and cooked for our con-
sumption. If so vulgar an expression were
allowed us, we might say that wherever we find
it, it has been already faked. This is what Mr.
Schiller has in mind when he calls independent
reality a mere unresisting v\r), which is only
to be made over by us.
That is Mr. Schiller's belief about the sen- '
sible core of reality. We 'encounter' it (in
Mr. Bradley's words) but don't possess it. Su-
perficially this sounds like Kant's view; but
between categories fulminated before nature
began, and categories gradually forming them-
selves in nature's presence, the whole chasm
between rationalism and empiricism yawns.
To the genuine 'Kantianer' Schiller will al-
ways be to Kant as a satyr to Hyperion. '
Other pragmatists may reach more positive
beliefs about the sensible core of reality. They
may think to get at it in its independent na-
ture, by peeling off the successive man-made
wrappings. They may make theories that tell
us where it comes from and all about it; and
249
PRAGMATISM
if these theories work satisfactorily they will be
true. The transcendental idealists say there is
no core, the finally completed wrapping being
reality and truth in one. Scholasticism still
teaches that the core is 'matter.' Professor
Bergson, Heymans, Strong, and others believe
in the core and bravely try to define it. Messrs.
Dewey and Schiller treat it as a ' limit.' Which
is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of
others comparable with them, unless it be the
one that finally proves the most satisfactory?
On the one hand there will stand reality, on the
other an account of it which it proves impos-
sible to better or to alter. If the impossibility
prove permanent, the truth of the account will
be absolute. Other content of truth than this
I can find nowhere. If the anti-pragmatists
have any other meaning, let them for heaven's
sake reveal it, let them grant us access to it!
Not being reality, but only our belief about
reality, it will contain human elements, but
these will know the non-human element, in the
only sense in which there can be knowledge of
anything. Does the river make its banks, or
250
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
do the banks make the river? Does a man
walk with his right leg or with his left leg more
essentially? Just as impossible may it be to
separate the real from the human factors in the
growth of our cognitive experience.
Let this stand as a first brief indication of
the humanistic position. Does it seem para-
doxical ? If so, I will try to make it plausible
by a few illustrations, which will lead to a
fuller acquaintance with the subject.
In many familiar objects every one will re-
cognize the human element. We conceive a
given reality in this way or in that, to suit our
purpose, and the reality passively submits to
the conception. You can take the number 27
as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9,
or as 26 plus l,or 100 minus 73, or in countless
other ways, of which one will be just as true as
another. You can take a chess-board as black
squares on a white ground, or as white squares
on a black ground, and neither conception is
a false one.
You can treat the adjoined figure as a star, as
two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexa-
251
PRAGMATISM
gon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal
triangles hanging together by their tips, etc.
A All these treatments are true
' ^ treatments — the sensible that
upon the paper resists no one
x . of them. You can say of a line
V that it runs east, or you can say
that it runs west, and the line per se accepts
both descriptions without rebelling at the in-
consistency.
We carve out groups of stars in the heavens,
and call them constellations, and the stars
patiently suffer us to do so, — though if they
knew what we were doing, some of them might
feel much surprised at the partners we had
given them. We name the same constellation
diversely, as Charles's Wain, the Great Bear, or
the Dipper. None of the names will be false,
and one will be as true as another, for all are
applicable.
In all these cases we humanly make an ad-
dition to some sensible reality, and that reality
tolerates the addition. All the additions ' agree'
with the reality; they fit it, while they build it
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
out. No one of them is false. Which may be
treated as the more true, depends altogether on
the human use of it. If the 27 is a number of
dollars which I find in a drawer where I had
left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of
inches in a board which I wish to insert as a
shelf into a cupboard 26 inches wide, it is 26
plus 1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by
the constellations I see there, * Charles's Wain'
would be more true than * Dipper.' My friend
Frederick Myers was humorously indignant
that that prodigious star-group should remind
us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.
What shall we call a thing anyhow ? It seems
quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything,
just as we carve out constellations, to suit our
human purposes. For me, this whole * audi-
ence' is one thing, which grows now restless,
now attentive. I have no use at present for its
individual units, so I don't consider them. So
of an 'army,' of a 'nation.' But in your own
eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you 'audi-
ence' is an accidental way of taking you. The
permanently real things for you are your indi-
253
PRAGMATISM
vidual persons. To an anatomist, again, those
persons are but organisms, and the real things
are the organs. Not the organs, so much as
their constituent cells, say the histologists ;
not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn
the chemists.
We break the flux of sensible reality into
things, then, at our will. We create the sub-
jects of our true as well as of our false pro-
positions.
We create the predicates also. Many of the
predicates of things express only the relations
of the things to us and to our feelings. Such
predicates of course are human additions.
Csesar crossed the Rubicon, and was a menace
to Rome's freedom. He is also an American
schoolroom pest, made into one by the reaction
of our schoolboys on his writings. The added
predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.
You see how naturally one comes to the
humanistic principle: you can't weed out the
human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives
are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories
we build them into, the inner order and ar-
254
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
rangement is wholly dictated by human con-
siderations, intellectual consistency being one
of them. Mathematics and logic themselves
are fermenting with human rearrangements;
physics, astronomy and biology follow massive
cues of preference. We plunge forward into
the field of fresh experience with the beliefs
our ancestors and we have made already;
these determine what we notice; what we
notice determines what we do; what we do
again determines what we experience ; so from
one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact
remains that there is a sensible flux, what is
true of it seems from first to last to be largely
a matter of our own creation.
We build the flux out inevitably. The great
question is: does it, with our additions, rise or
fall in value? Are the additions worthy or un-
worthy ? Suppose a universe composed of seven
stars, and nothing else but three human wit-
nesses and their critic. One witness names the
stars 'Great Bear'; one calls them 'Charles's
Wain'; one calls them the 'Dipper.' Which
human addition has made the best universe of
255
PRAGMATISM
the given stellar material ? If Frederick Myers
were the critic, he would have no hesitation in
'turning down' the American witness.
Lotze has in several places made a deep sug-
gestion. We naively assume, he says, a relation
between reality and our minds which may be
just the opposite of the true one. Reality, we
naturally think, stands ready-made and com-
plete, and our intellects supervene with the one
simple duty of describing it as it is already.
But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks, be
themselves important additions to reality?
And may not previous reality itself be there,
far less for the purpose of reappearing unal-
tered in our knowledge, than for the very pur-
pose of stimulating our minds to such additions
as shall enhance the universe's total value. 'Die
erhbhung des vorgefundenen daseins9 is a
phrase used by Professor Eucken somewhere,
which reminds one of this suggestion by the
great Lotze.
It is identically our pragmatistic conception.
In our cognitive as well as in our active life we
are creative. We add, both to the subject and
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PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
to the predicate part of reality. The world
stands really malleable, waiting to receive its
final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom
of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly.
Man engenders truths upon it.
No one can deny that such a role would add
both to our dignity and to our responsibility
as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most
inspiring notion. Signore Papini, the leader of
Italian pragmatism, grows fairly dithyrambic
over the view that it opens of man's divinely-
creative functions.
The import of the difference between prag-
matism and rationalism is now in sight through-
out its whole extent. The essential contrast is
that for rationalism reality is ready-made and
complete from all eternity, while for pragma-
tism it is still in the making, and awaits part of
its complexion from the future. On the one side
the universe is absolutely secure, on the other
it is still pursuing its adventures.
We have got into rather deep water with this
humanistic view, and it is no wonder that mis-
understanding gathers round it. It is accused
257
PRAGMATISM
of being a doctrine of caprice. Mr. Bradley,
for example, says that a humanist, if he under-
stood his own doctrine, would have to 'hold
any end, however perverted, to be rational, if
I insist on it personally, and any idea, however
mad, to be the truth if only some one is resolved
that he will have it so.' The humanist view of
' reality,' as something resisting, yet malleable,
which controls our thinking as an energy that
must be taken 'account' of incessantly (tho
not necessarily merely copied) is evidently a
difficult one to introduce to novices. The situ-
ation reminds me of one that I have personally
gone through. I once wrote an essay on our
right to believe, which I unluckily called the
Will to Believe. All the critics, neglecting the
essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically
it was impossible, morally it was iniquitous.
The 'will to deceive,' the 'will to make-
believe,' were wittily proposed as substitutes
for it.
The alternative between pragmatism and ra-
tionalism, in the shape in which we now have
it before us, is no longer a question in the theory
258
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the uni-
verse itself.
On the pragmatist side we. have only one
edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in
all sorts of places, especially in the places where
thinking beings are at work.
On the rationalist side we have a universe in
many editions, one real one, the infinite folio, or
edition de luxe, eternally complete; and then
the various finite editions, full of false readings,
distorted and mutilated each in its own way.
So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of plu-
ralism and monism here come back upon us.
I will develope their differences during the
remainder of our hour.
.And first let me say that it is impossible not
to see a temperamental difference at work in
the choice of sides. The rationalist mind, radi-
cally taken, is of a doctrinaire and authorita-
tive complexion: the phrase 'must be' is ever
on its lips. The bellyband of its universe must
be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other
hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of
creature. If he had to live in a tub like Dio-
259
PRAGMATISM
genes he wouldn't mind at all if the hoops were
loose and the staves let in the sun.
Now the idea of this loose universe affects
your typical rationalists in much the same way
as 'freedom of the press' might affect a veteran
official in the Russian bureau of censorship; or
as 'simplified spelling' might affect an elderly
schoolmistress. It affects him as the swarm of
protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It
appears as backboneless and devoid of prin-
ciple as 'opportunism' in politics appears to an
old-fashioned French legitimist, or to a fanat-
ical believer in the divine right of the people.
For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up
inside of all the finite experiences. They lean
on each other, but the whole of them, if such a
whole there be, leans on nothing. All 'homes'
are in finite experience; finite experience as
such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux
secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only
from its own intrinsic promises and potencies.
To rationalists this describes a tramp and
vagrant world, adrift in space, with neither
elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot
260
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
upon. It is a set of stars hurled into heaven
without even a centre of gravity to pull against.
In other spheres of life it is true that we have
got used to living in a state of relative insecur-
ity. The authority of * the State,' and that of an
absolute 'moral law,' have resolved themselves
into expediencies, and holy church has resolved
itself into 'meeting-houses.' Not so as yet
within the philosophic classrooms. A universe
with such as us contributing to create its truth,
a world delivered to our opportunisms and our
private judgments! Home-rule for Ireland
would be a millennium in comparison. We're
no more fit for such a part than the Filipinos
are 'fit for self-government.' Such a world
would not be respectable philosophically. It
is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar
in the eyes of most professors of philosophy.
What then would tighten this loose universe,
according to the professors ?
Something to support the finite many, to tie
it to, to unify and anchor it. Something un-
exposed to accident, something eternal and un-
alterable. The mutable in experience must be
261
PRAGMATISM
founded on immutability. Behind our de facto
world, our world in act, there must be a de jure
duplicate fixed and previous, with all that can
happen here already there in posse, every drop
of blood, every smallest item, appointed and
provided, stamped and branded, without chance
of variation. The negatives that haunt our
ideals here below must be themselves negated
in the absolutely Real. This alone makes the
universe solid. This is the resting deep. We
live upon the stormy surface; but with this
our anchor holds, for it grapples rocky bottom.
This is Wordsworth's 'eternal peace abiding
at the heart of endless agitation.' This is
Vivekanda's mystical One of which I read to
you. This is Reality with the big R, reality
that makes the timeless claim, reality to which
defeat can't happen. This is what the men of
principles, and in general all the men whom
I called tender-minded in my first lecture,
think themselves obliged to postulate.
And this, exactly this, is what the tough-
minded of that lecture find themselves moved
to call a piece of perverse abstraction- worship.
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
The tough-minded are the men whose alpha
and omega are facts. Behind the bare pheno-
menal facts, as my tough-minded old friend
Chauncey Wright, the great Harvard empiri-
cist of my youth, used to say, there is nothing.
When a rationalist insists that behind the facts
there is the ground of the facts, the possibility
of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him
of taking the mere name and nature of a fact
and clapping it behind the fact as a duplicate
entity to make it possible. That such sham
grounds are often invoked is notorious. At a
surgical operation I once heard a bystander ask
a doctor why the patient breathed so deeply.
'Because ether is a respiratory stimulant,' the
doctor answered. 'Ah!' said the questioner,
as if that were a good explanation. But this
is like saying that cyanide of potassium kills
because it is a 'poison,' or that it is so cold
to-night because it is ' winter/ or that we have
five fingers because we are 'pentadactyls.'
These are but names for the facts, taken from
the facts, and then treated as previous and
explanatory. The tender-minded notion of an
263
PRAGMATISM
absolute reality is, according to the radically
tough-minded, framed on just this pattern. It
is but our summarizing name for the whole
spread-out and strung-along mass of pheno-
mena, treated as if it were a different entity,
both one and previous.
You see how differently people take things.
The world we live in exists diffused and dis-
tributed, in the form of an indefinitely numer-
ous lot of caches, coherent in all sorts of ways
and degrees; and the tough-minded are per-
fectly willing to keep them at that valuation.
They can stand that kind of world, their tem-
per being well adapted to its insecurity. Not
so the tender-minded party. They must back
the world we find ourselves born into by ' an-
other and a better' world in which the caches
form an All and the All a One that logically
presupposes, co-implicates, and secures each
each without exception.
Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-
minded ? or can we treat the absolute edition
of the world as a legitimate hypothesis ? It is
certainly legitimate, for it is thinkable, whether
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
we take it in its abstract or in its concrete
shape.
By taking it abstractly I mean placing it be-
hind our finite life as we place the word ' win-
ter' behind to-night's cold weather. * Winter'
is only the name for a certain number of days
which we find generally characterized by cold
weather, but it guarantees nothing in that line,
for our thermometer to-morrow may soar into
the 70 's. Nevertheless the word is a useful one
to plunge forward with into the stream of our
experience. It cuts off certain probabilities
and sets up others. You can put away your
straw hats; you can unpack your arctics. It
is a summary of things to look for. It names
a part of nature's habits, and gets you ready for
their continuation. It is a definite instrument
abstracted from experience, a conceptual real-
ity that you must take account of, and which
reflects you totally back into sensible realities.
The pragmatist is the last person to deny the
reality of such abstractions. They are so much
past experience funded.
But taking the absolute edition of the world
265
PRAGMATISM
concretely means a different hypothesis. Ra-
tionalists take it concretely and oppose it to
the world's finite editions. They give it a par-
ticular nature. It is perfect, finished. Every-
thing known there is known along with every-
thing else; here, where ignorance reigns, far
otherwise. If there is want there, there also
is the satisfaction provided. Here all is pro-
cess; that world is timeless. Possibilities ob-
tain in our world ; in the absolute world, where
all that is not is from eternity impossible, and
all that is is necessary, the category of possi-
bility has no application. In this world crimes
and horrors are regretable. In that totalized
world regret obtains not, for ' the existence of
ill in the temporal order is the very condition
of the perfection of the eternal order.'
Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate
in pragmatist eyes, for either has its uses. Ab-
stractly, or taken like the word winter, as a
memorandum of past experience that orients
us towards the future, the notion of the abso-
lute world is indispensable. Concretely taken,
it is also indispensable, at least to certain minds,
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PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
for it determines them religiously, being often
a thing to change their lives by, and by chang-
ing their lives, to change whatever in the outer
order depends on them.
We can not therefore methodically join the
tough minds in their rejection of the whole
notion of a world beyond our finite experience.
One misunderstanding of pragmatism is to
identify it with positivistic tough-mindedness,
to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic
notion as so much jabber and gesticulation,
that it loves intellectual anarchy as such and
prefers a sort of wolf- world absolutely unpent
and wild and without a master or a collar to
any philosophic classroom product whatsoever.
I have said so much in these lectures against
the over-tender fcrms of rationalism, that I am
prepared for some misunderstanding here, but
I confess that the amount of it that I have found
in this very audience surprises me, for I have
simultaneously defended rationalistic hypo-
theses, so far as these re-direct you fruitfully
into experience.
For instance I receive this morning this
267
PRAGMATISM
question on a post-card : " Is a pragmatist neces-
sarily a complete materialist and agnostic?"1
One of my oldest friends, who ought to know
me better, writes me a letter that accuses the
pragmatism I am recommending of shutting
out all wider metaphysical views and condemn-
ing us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism. Let
me read you some extracts from it.
"It seems to me," my friend writes, "that
the pragmatic objection to pragmatism lies in
the fact that it might accentuate the narrow-
ness of narrow minds.
" Your call to the rejection of the namby-
pamby and the wishy-washy is of course in-
spiring. But altho it is salutary and stim-
ulating to be told that one should be respon-
sible for the immediate issues and bearings of
his words and thoughts, I decline to be de-
prived of the pleasure and profit of dwelling
also on remoter bearings and issues, and it
is the tendency of pragmatism to refuse this
privilege.
"In short, it seems to me that the limitations,
or rather the dangers, of the pragmatic tend-
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PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM
ency, are analogous to those which beset the
unwary followers of the ' natural sciences/
Chemistry and physics are eminently prag-
matic; and many of their devotees, smugly
content with the data that their weights and
measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and
disdain for all students of philosophy and meta-
physics whomsoever. And of course every-
thing can be expressed, — after a fashion, and
' theoretically,' - - in terms of chemistry and
physics, that is, everything except the vital prin-
ciple of the whole, and that, they say, there is
no pragmatic use in trying to express ; it has no
bearings — for them. I for my part refuse
to be persuaded that we can not look beyond
the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and the
pragmatist to a logical unity in which they
take no interest."
How is such a conception of the pragma-
tism I am advocating possible, after my first
and second lectures? I have all along been
offering it expressly as a mediator between
tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness. If
the notion of a world ante rem> whether taken
PRAGMATISM
abstractly like the word winter, or concretely
as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be shown
to have any consequences whatever for our
life, it has a meaning. If the meaning works,
it will have some truth that ought to be held
to through all possible reformulations, for
pragmatism.
The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection
is eternal, aboriginal, and most real, has a per-
fectly definite meaning, and it works relig-
iously. To examine how, will be the subject
of my next and final lecture.
VIII
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
LECTURE VIII
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
AT the close of the last lecture I reminded you
of the first one, in which I had opposed tough-
mindedness to tender-mindedness and recom-
mended pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-
mindedness positively rejects tender-minded-
ness's hypothesis of an eternal perfect edition
of the universe coexisting with our finite ex-
perience.
On pragmatic principles we can not reject
any hypothesis if consequences useful to life
flow from it. Universal conceptions, as things
to take account of, may be as real for prag-
matism as particular sensations are. They
have, indeed, no meaning and no reality if
they have no use. But if they have any use
they have that amount of meaning. And the
meaning will be true if the use squares well
with life's other uses.
Well, the use of the Absolute is proved by
the whole course of men's religious history.
The eternal arms are then beneath. Remember
273
PRAGMATISM
Vivekanda's use of the Atman: it is indeed not
a scientific use, for we can make no particular
deductions from it. It is emotional and spirit-
ual altogether.
It is always best to discuss things by the
help of concrete examples. Let me read there-
fore some of those verses entitled 'To You'
by Walt Whitman — 'You' of course mean-
ing the reader or hearer of the poem whosoever
he or she may be.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you that you be
my poem;
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many men and women and men, but I love none
better than you.
0 I have been dilatory and dumb;
1 should have made my way to you long ago;
I should have blabbed nothing but you, I should have chanted
nothing but you.
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you; <
None have done justice to you — you have not done justice
to yourself;
None but have found you imperfect — I only find no imper-
fection in you.
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PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
0 I could sing such glories and grandeurs about you;
You have not known what you are — you have slumbered
upon yourself all your life;
What you have done returns already in mockeries.
But the mockeries are not you;
Underneath them and within them, I see you lurk;
1 pursue you where none else has pursued you.
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the ac-
customed routine, if these conceal you from others,
or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me ;
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion,
if these balk others, they do not balk me;
The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed,
premature death, all these I part aside.
There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in
you;
There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good
is in you;
No pluck nor endurance in others, but as good is in you;
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits
for you.
Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the east and west are tame, compared with
you;
These immense meadows — these interminable rivers — you
are immense and interminable as they;
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PRAGMATISM
You are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements,
pain, passion, dissolution.
The hopples fall from your ankles — you find an unfailing
sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest
whatever you are promulges itself;
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
nothing is scanted;
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what
you are picks its way.
Verily a fine and moving poem, in any case,
but there are two ways of taking it, both useful.
One is the monistic way, the mystical way of
pure cosmic emotion. The glories and grand-
eurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the
midst of your defacements. Whatever may
happen to you, whatever you may appear to be,
inwardly you are safe. Look back, lie back,
on your true principle of being! This is the
famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its
enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet
pragmatism must respect this way, for it has
massive historic vindication.
But pragmatism sees another way to be re-
276
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
spected also, the pluralistic way of interpret- J
ing the poem. The you so glorified, to which
the hymn is sung, may mean your better pos-
sibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific
redemptive effects even of your failures, upon
yourself or others. It may mean your loyalty
to the possibilities of others whom you admire
and love so that you are willing to accept your
own poor life, for it is that glory's partner. You
can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the
audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the
low in yourself, then, think only of the high.
Identify your life therewith; then, through
angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you
thus make yourself, whatever you thus most
deeply are, picks its way.
In either way of taking the poem, it encour-
ages fidelity to ourselves. Both ways satisfy;
both sanctify the human flux. Both paint the
portrait of the you on a gold background. But
the background of the first way is the static
One, while in the second way it means possibles
in the plural, genuine possibles, and it has all
the restlessness of that conception.
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PRAGMATISM
Noble enough is either way of reading the
poem; but plainly the pluralistic way agrees
with the pragmatic temper best, for it immedi-
i ately suggests an infinitely larger number of
the details of future experience to our mind.
It sets definite activities in us at work. Altho .
this second way seems prosaic and earth-born
in comparison with the first way, yet no one
can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any
brutal sense of the term. Yet if, as pragmatists,
you should positively set up the second way
against the first way, you would very likely
be misunderstood. You would be accused of
denying nobler conceptions, and of being an
ally of tough-mindedness in the worst sense.
You remember the letter from a member of
this audience from which I read some ex-
tracts at our previous meeting. Let me read
you an additional extract now . It shows a vague-
ness in realizing the alternatives before us
which I think is very widespread.
"I believe," writes my friend and corre-
spondent, "in pluralism; I believe that in our
search for truth we leap from one floating cake
278
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
of ice to another, on an infinite sea, and that by
each of our acts we make new truths possible
and old ones impossible; I believe that each
man is responsible for making the universe
better, and that if he does not do this it will
be in so far left undone.
'Yet at the same time I am willing to en-
dure that my children should be incurably sick
and suffering (as they are not) and I myself
stupid and yet with brains enough to see my
stupidity, only on one condition, namely, that
through the construction, in imagination and
by reasoning, of a rational unity of all things,
I can conceive my acts and my thoughts and
my troubles as supplemented by all the other
phenomena of the world, and as forming —
when thus supplemented — a scheme which /
approve and adopt as my own; and for my part
I refuse to be persuaded that we can not look
beyond the obvious pluralism of the natural-
ist and pragmatist to a logical unity in which
they take no interest or stock."
Such a fine expression of personal faith
warms the heart of the hearer. But how much
279
PRAGMATISM
does it clear his philosophic head ? Does the
writer consistently favor the monistic, or the
pluralistic, interpretation of the world's poem?
His troubles become atoned for when thus sup-
plemented, he says, supplemented, that is, by
all the remedies that the other phenomena may
supply. Obviously here the writer faces for-
ward into the particulars of experience, which
he interprets in a pluralistic-melioristic way.
But he believes himself to face backward.
He speaks of what he calls the rational unity of
things, when all the while he really means their
possible empirical unification. He supposes at
the same time that the pragmatist, because he
criticises rationalism's abstract One, is cut off
from the consolation of believing in the saving
possibilities of the concrete many. He fails
in short to distinguish between taking the
world's perfection as a necessary principle, and
taking it only as a possible terminus ad quern.
I regard the writer of the letter as a genuine
pragmatist, but as a pragmatist sans le savoir.
He appears to me as one of that numerous
class of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of
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PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
in my first lecture, as wishing to have all the
good things going, without being too careful
as to how they agree or disagree. * Rational
unity of all things' is so inspiring a formula,
that he brandishes it off-hand, and abstractly
accuses pluralism of conflicting with it (for the
bare names do conflict), altho concretely he
means by it just the pragmatistically unified
and ameliorated world. Most of us remain in
this essential vagueness, and it is well that we
should ; but in the interest of clearheadedness
it is well that some of us should go farther, so
I will try now to focus a little more discrim-
inatingly on this particular religious point.
Is then this you of yous, this absolutely real
world, this unity that yields the moral inspira-
tion and has the religious value, to be taken
monistically or pluralistically? Is it ante rem
or in rebus ? Is it a principle or an end, an ab-
solute or an ultimate, a first or a last ? Does it
make you look forward or lie back ? It is cer-
tainly worth while not to clump the two things
together, for if discriminated, they have de-
cidedly diverse meanings for life.
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PRAGMATISM
Please observe that the whole dilemma re-
volves pragmatically about the notion of the
world's possibilities. Intellectually, rationalism
invokes its absolute principle of unity, as a
ground of possibility for the many facts. Emo-
tionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of
possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be
good. Taken in this way, the absolute makes
all good things certain, and all bad things im-
possible (in the eternal, namely), and may be
said to transmute the entire category of possi-
bility into categories more secure. One sees
at this point that the great religious difference
lies between the men who insist that the world
must and shall be, and those who are contented
with believing that the world may be, saved.
The whole clash of rationalistic and empiricist
religion is thus over the validity of possibility.
It is necessary therefore to begin by focusing
upon that word. What may the word ' possible '
definitely mean ? To unreflecting men it means
a sort of third estate of being, less real than
existence, more real than non-existence, a twi-
light realm, a hybrid status, a limbo into which
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PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
and out of which realities ever and anon are
made to pass.
Such a conception is of .course too vague
and nondescript to satisfy us. Here, as else-
where, the only way to extract a term's mean-
ing is to use the pragmatic method on it. When
you say that a thing is possible, what difference
does it make ? It makes at least this difference
that if any one calls it impossible you can con-
tradict him, if any one calls it actual you can
contradict him, and if any one calls it neces-
sary you can contradict him too.
But these privileges of contradiction don't
amount to much. When you say a thing is
possible, does not that make some farther
difference in terms of actual fact?
It makes at least this negative difference that
if the statement be true, it follows that there
is nothing extant capable of preventing the pos-
sible thing. The absence of real grounds of
interference may thus be said to make things
not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or
abstract sense.
But most possibles are not bare, they are
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PRAGMATISM
concretely grounded, or well-grounded, as we
say. What does this mean pragmatically? It
means not only that there are no preventive
conditions present, but that some of the con-
ditions of production of the possible thing
actually are here. Thus a concretely possible
chicken means: (1) that the idea of chicken
contains no essential self-contradiction ; (2)
that no boys, skunks, or other enemies are
about ; and (3) that at least an actual egg
exists. Possible chicken means actual egg —
plus actual sitting hen, or incubator, or what
not. As the actual conditions approach com-
pleteness the chicken becomes a better-and-
better-grounded possibility. When the con-
ditions are entirely complete, it ceases to be
a possibility, and turns into an actual fact.
Let us apply this notion to the salvation of
the world. What does it pragmatically mean
to say that this is possible ? It means that some
of the conditions of the world's deliverance do
actually exist. The more of them there are
existent, the fewer preventing conditions you
can find, the better-grounded is the salvation's
284
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
possibility, the more probable does the fact of
the deliverance become.
So much for our preliminary look at pos-
sibility.
Now it would contradict the very spirit of
life to say that our minds must be indiffer-
ent and neutral in questions like that of the
world's salvation. Any one who pretends to be
neutral writes himself down here as a fool and
a sham. We all do wish to minimize the inse-
curity of the universe; we are and ought to be
unhappy when we regard it as exposed to every
enemy and open to every life-destroying draft.
Nevertheless there are unhappy men who
think the salvation of the world impossible.
Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that
thinks the world's salvation necessary.
Midway between the two there stands what
may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho
it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than
as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism
has always been the regnant doctrine in Euro-
pean philosophy. Pessimism was only re-
285
PRAGMATISM
cently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts
few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism
treats salvation as neither necessary nor im-
possible. It treats it as a possibility, which
becomes more and more of a probability the
more numerous the actual conditions of salva-
tion become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline
towards meliorism. Some conditions of the
world's salvation are actually extant, and she
can not possibly close her eyes to this fact:
and should the residual conditions come, salva-
tion would become an accomplished reality.
Naturally the terms I use here are exceedingly
summary. You may interpret the word ' salva-
tion' in any way you like, and make it as
diffuse and distributive, or as climacteric and
integral a phenomenon as you please.
Take, for example, any one of us in this
room with the ideals which he cherishes and is
willing to live and work for. Every such ideal
realized will be one moment in the world's sal-
vation. But these particular ideals are not bare
abstract possibilities. They are grounded, they
286
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
are live possibilities, for we are their live cham-
pions and pledges, and if the complementary
conditions come and add themselves, our ideals
will become actual things. What now are the
complementary conditions ? They are first such
a mixture of things as will in the fulness of
time give us a chance, a gap that we can spring
into, and, finally, our act.
Does our act then create the world's salva-
tion so far as it makes room for itself, so far as
it leaps into the gap ? Does it create, not the
whole world's salvation of course, but just so
much of this as itself covers of the world's
extent ?
Here I take the bull by the horns, and in
spite of the whole crew of rationalists and
monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask why
not? Our acts, our turning-places, where we
seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow,
are the parts of the world to which we are
closest, the parts of which our knowledge is
the most intimate and complete. Why should
we not take them at their face- value? Why
may they not be the actual turning-places and
287
PRAGMATISM
growing-places which they seem to be, of the
world — why not the workshop of being, where
we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere
may the world grow in any other kind of way
than this?
Irrational! we are told. How can new being
come in local spots and patches which add
themselves or stay away at random, independ-
ently of the rest? There must be a reason for
our acts, and where in the last resort can any
reason be looked for save in the material
pressure or the logical compulsion of the total
nature of the world? There can be but one real
agent of growth, or seeming growth, any where,
and that agent is the integral world itself. It
may grow all-over, if growth there be, but that
single parts should grow per se is irrational.
But if one talks of rationality — and of rea-
sons for things, and insists that they can't just
come in spots, what kind of a reason can there
ultimately be why anything should come at
all ? Talk of logic and necessity and categories
and the absolute and the contents of the whole
philosophical machine-shop as you will, the
288
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
only real reason I can think of why anything
should ever come is that some one wishes it to
be here. It is demanded, — demanded, it may
be, to give relief to no matter how small a
fraction of the world's mass. This is living
reason, and compared with it material causes
and logical necessities are spectral things.
In short the only fully rational world would
be the world of wishing-caps, the world of tele-
pathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter,
without having to consider or placate surround-
ing or intermediate powers. This is the Abso-
lute's own world. He calls upon the phenome-
nal world to be, and it is, exactly as he calls for
it, no other condition being required. In our
world, the wishes of the individual are only
one condition. Other individuals are there
with other wishes and they must be propitiated
first. So Being grows under all sorts of resist-
ances in this world of the many, and, from
compromise to compromise, only gets organ-
ized gradually into what may be called second-
arily rational shape. We approach the wish-
ing-cap type of organization only in a few de-
289
PRAGMATISM
partments of life. We want water and we turn
a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we
press a button. We want information and we
telephone. We want to travel and we buy a
ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly
need to do more than the wishing — the world
is rationally organized to do the rest.
But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis
and a digression. What we were discussing
was the idea of a world growing not inte-
grally but piecemeal by the contributions of its
several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously
and as a live one. Suppose that the world's au-
thor put the case to you before creation, saying:
"I am going to make a world not certain to be
saved, a world the perfection of which shall
be conditional merely, the condition being that
each several agent does its own 'level best.'
I offer you the chance of taking part in such
a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It
is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may
win through. It is a social scheme of co-op-
erative work genuinely to be done. Will you
join the procession? Will you trust yourself
290
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
and trust the other agents enough to face the
risk?"
Should you in all seriousness, if participa-
tion in such a world were proposed to you, feel
bound to reject it as not safe enough ? Would
you say that, rather than be part and parcel
of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational
a universe, you preferred to relapse into the
slumber of nonentity from which you had been
momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice ?
Of course if you are normally constituted,
you would do nothing of the sort. There is a
healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which
such a universe would exactly fit. We would
therefore accept the offer - [< Top ! und schlag
auf schlag!" It would be just like the world
we practically live in; and loyalty to our old
nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The
world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in
the most living way.
Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome
the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of
the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for
there are morbid minds in every human collect-
291
PRAGMATISM
ion, and to them the prospect of a universe
with only a fighting chance of safety would
probably make no appeal. There are moments
of discouragement in us all, when we are sick
of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own
life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude
of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances
of things. We want a universe where we can
just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be
absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of
water melts into the river or the sea.
The peace and rest, the security desiderated
at such moments is security against the bewil-
dering accidents of so much finite experience.
Nirvana means safety from this everlasting
round of adventures of which the world of
sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist,
for this is essentially their attitude, are simply
afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life.
And to men of this complexion, religious
monism comes with its consoling words: "All
is needed and essential — even you with your
sick soul and heart. All are one with God, and
with God all is well. The everlasting arms are
292
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
beneath, whether in the world of finite appear-
ance you seem to fail or to succeed." There can
be no doubt that when men are reduced to their
last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving
scheme. Pluralistic moralism simply makes
their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the very heart
within their breast.
So we see concretely two types of religion in
sharp contrast. Using our old terms of compar-
ison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme
appeals to the tender-minded while the plural-
istic scheme appeals to the tough. Many per-
sons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme
religious at all. They would call it moralistic,
and would apply the word religious to the
monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense
of self-surrender, and moralism in the sense of
self-sufficingness, have been pitted against each
other as incompatibles frequently enough in
the history of human thought.
We stand here before the final question of
philosophy. I said in my fourth lecture that
I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative
to be the deepest and most pregnant question
293
PRAGMATISM
that our minds can frame. Can it be that the
disjunction is a final one ? that only one side can
be true ? Are a pluralism and monism genuine
incompatibles ? So that, if the world were
really pluralistically constituted, if it really
existed distributively and were made up of a
lot of caches, it could only be saved piecemeal
and de facto as the result of their behavior, and
its epic history in no wise short-circuited by
some essential oneness in which the severalness
were already 'taken up' beforehand and eter-
nally 'overcome'? If this were so, we should
have to choose one philosophy or the other.
We could not say 'yes, yes 'to both alternatives.
There would have to be a 'no' in our relations
with the possible. We should confess an ulti-
mate disappointment: we could not remain
healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indi-
visible act.
Of course as human beings we can be healthy
minds on one day and sick souls on the next;
and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may
perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic
pluralists, or free-will determinists, or what-
294
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
ever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind.
But as philosophers aiming at clearness and
consistency, and feeling the pragmatistic need
of squaring truth with truth, the question is
forced upon us of frankly adopting either the
tender or the robustious type of thought. In
particular this query has always come home to
me : May not the claims of tender-mindedness
go too far ? May not the notion of a world al-
ready saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine
to stand ? May not religious optimism be too
idyllic? Must all be saved? Is no price to
be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last
word sweet? Is all 'yes, yes' in the universe?
Does n't the fact of 'no' stand at the very core
of life? Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that
we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes
and losses form a part of it, that there are genu-
ine sacrifices somewhere, and that something
permanently drastic and bitter always remains
at the bottom of its cup ?
I can not speak officially as a pragmatisthere;
all I can say is that my own pragmatism offers
no objection to my taking sides with this more
295
PRAGMATISM
moralistic view, and giving up the claim of
total reconciliation. The possibility of this is
involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat
pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end
it is our faith and not our logic that decides
such questions, and I deny the right of any
pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find
myself willing to take the universe to be really
dangerous and adventurous, without therefore
backing out and crying 'no play.' I am willing
to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to
us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right
and final attitude towards the whole of life. I
am willing that there should be real losses and
real losers, and no total preservation of all that
is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not
as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole.
When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left
behind for ever, but the possibility of what is
poured off is sweet enough to accept.
As a matter of fact countless human imag-
inations live in this moralistic and epic kind of
a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-
along successes sufficient for their rational
296
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
needs. There is a finely translated epigram in
the Greek anthology which admirably expresses
this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as
unatoned for, even though the lost element
might be one's self:
"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale."
Those puritans who answered * yes ' to the ques-
tion: Are you willing to be damned for God's
glory? were in this objective and magnan-
imous condition of mind. The way of escape
from evil on this system is not by getting it
'aufgehoben,' or preserved in the whole as an
element essential but * overcome.' // is by drop-
ping it out altogether, throwing it overboard
and getting beyond it, helping to make a uni-
verse that shall forget its very place and name.
It is then perfectly possible to accept sin-
cerely a drastic kind of a universe from which
the element of 'seriousness' is not to be ex-
pelled. Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a
genuine pragmatist. He is willing to live on
297
PRAGMATISM
a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he
trusts ; willing to pay with his own person, if
need be, for the realization of the ideals which
he frames.
What now actually are the other forces
which he trusts to co-operate with him, in
a universe of such a type ? They are at least
his fellow men, in the stage of being which our
actual universe has reached. But are there not
superhuman forces also, such as religious men
of the pluralistic type we have been consider-
ing have always believed in? Their words
may have sounded monistic when they said
"there is no God but God"; but the original
polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly
and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism,
and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious
and not a scheme of classroom instruction for
the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as
but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst
of all the shapers of the great world's fate.
I fear that my previous lectures, confined
as they have been to human and humanistic
aspects, may have left the impression on many
298
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
of you that pragmatism means methodically
to leave the superhuman out. I have shown
small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I
have until this moment spoken of no other
superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust
that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has
nothing but its superhumanness in common
with the theistic God. On pragmatistic prin-
ciples, if the hypothesis of God works satisfac-
torily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
Now whatever its residual difficulties may be,
experience shows that it certainly does work,
and that the problem is to build it out and de-
termine it so that it will combine satisfactorily
with all the other working truths. I can not
start upon a whole theology at the end of this
last lecture; but when I tell you that I have
written a book on men's religious experience,
which on the whole has been regarded as mak-
ing for the reality of God, you will perhaps
exempt my own pragmatism from the charge
of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbe-
lieve, myself, that our human experience is the
highest form of experience extant in the uni-
299
PRAGMATISM
verse. I believe rather that we stand in much
the same relation to the whole of the universe
as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of
, human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms
and libraries. They take part in scenes of
whose significance they have no inkling. They
are merely tangent Jo curves of history the
beginnings and ends and forms of which pass
wholly beyond their ken So we are tangent
to the wider life of things. But, just as many
of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our
ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living
proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the
proofs that religious experience affords, that
higher powers exist and are at work to save the
world on ideal lines similar to our own.
You see that pragmatism can be called re-
* ligious, if you allow that religion can be plural-
istic or merely melioristic in type. But whether
you will finally put up with that type of relig-
ion or not is a question that only you yourself
can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dog-
matic answer, for we do not yet know certainly
* which type of religion is going to work best
300
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION
in the long run. The various overbeliefs of
men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact
what are needed to bring the evidence in. You
will probably make your own ventures sev-
erally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of
the sensible facts of nature will be enough for
you, and you will need no religion at all. If
radically tender, you will take up with the
more monistic form of religion : the pluralistic
form, with its reliance on possibilities that are
not necessities, will not seem to afford you se-
curity enough.
But if you are neither tough nor tender in an
extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most
of us are, it may seem to you that the type of
pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have
offered is as good a religious synthesis as you
are likely to find. Between the two extremes
of crude naturalism on the one hand and tran-
scendental absolutism on the other, you may
find that what I take the liberty of calling the
pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is J
exactly what you require.
INDEX
INDEX
Abbey, Westminster, 39.
ABEL, 214.
Absolute, the, 19, 145, 150 f, 270,
289; its barrenness, 71; its
value, 73 f, 282; its inaccept-
ability, 78; vs. the 'Ultimate,'
159.
Absolute edition of the world,
265 f.
Absolute truth, 224.
Abstract ideas, their use, 128,
150, 172, 210, 265.
Abstractness as a vice in philoso-
phizing, 19, 30, 34, 51, 231, 263.
Accountability, 116.
Additions, human, to the given,
255.
Agreement with reality, 212.
Ancestral discoveries, 170, 182.
Anthology, the Greek, 297.
A priori truth, 209.
Baby, 174.
BALFOUR, 104 f .
Bear, the great, 252 f .
Belief, see 'truth.'
BERKELEY, 89.
BOSANQUET, 17.
Boston, 13.
BOWNE, 18.
BRADLEY, 30, 142, 249, 258.
CESAR, 214, 254.
CAIN, 214.
CAIRD, 17, 246.
Caprice, excluded by pragma-
tism, 211, 233, 258.
Cause, 180.
Charles's Wain, 252 f .
CHESTERTON, 3.
Claim, truth as a, 227 f .
Clash of beliefs, 76 f.
Classroom philosophy, 21.
CLERK-MAXWELL, 197.
Climate, 87.
Common sense, Lecture V; de-
fined, 171; its 'categories,' 173;
a definite stage in evolution;
result of successive discoveries,
170, 182.
Concepts, their use, 128, 172.
Conjunctive relations, 147 f.
Constellations, 252 f .
Copy-theory of truth, 199, 213, 235.
Corridor-theory, 54.
Cowpath, 203.
Creative functions of human
mind, 255 f, 287 f .
Cripple Creek, 13.
'Critical' level of thought, 185,
189 f.
Critical philosophy, 186.
Criticisms of pragmatism, 233,
258, 268.
Damned, Leibnitz on the, 24.
Design in nature, 109-115.
Desire creative of reality, 287.
DEWEY, 57, 75, 233.
Dilemma of philosophy, Lecture
I, especially, pp. 15-20.
'Dipper,' the, 252 f.
Discourse, universe of, 133; its
relation to truth, 212 f.
305
INDEX
Disjunctive relations, 148 f .
Dog, mind of, 175.
DUHEM, 57.
Empiricism, 9 f , 51; 'radical,'
ix.
Energy, 191, 216.
Escape, philosophies as places of,
34.
Eucharist, 88.
EUCKEN, 256.
Experience, sensible, 172.
Facts, 263; empiricism holds by
them, 12; pragmatism loves
them, 68; idealism neglects
them, 70; their relation to
truth, 225.
Fallacy, the sentimentalist's, 229.
Fitness, 113.
Football-game, 12.
FRANKLIN, 49.
Free-will, problem of, 115 f; a
melioristic doctrine, 119.
FULLER-TON, 117.
Future, hypothesis of world with-
out, 96 f; of world with, 100.
Geniuses, prehistoric, 182.
GOD, 19, 70, 72, 80, 97 f, 104-
115, 299; vs. matter as a prin-
ciple, 101 f; scholastic defini-
tion of, 121; supposed choice
offered us by, 290.
Good, its relation to truth, 75.
GREEN, 17, 246.
HAECKEL, 15.
Health, 222.
HETMANS, 57.
History of pragmatism, 46 f .
HODGSON, 50.
Holidays, moral, 74.
Humanism, 65; Lecture VII, es-
pecially, 242 f. __^
HUXLEY, 120.
Ideals, as creative, 286 f.
Idealism, transcendental, 17; see
'Absolute'; Berkeley's, 89.
Identity, personal, 90 f .
Imputability, 117.
Influence, 134 f.
Instrumental view of truth, 53,
194.
Intellectualism, 10, 200; see 'ra-
tionalism.'
Intellectualist attacks on prag-
matism, 67; view of truth, 200,
218, 226.
Interaction of things, 134 f .
KANT, 172.
Kinds. 180.
Knower, the absolute, 147, 150,
165.
Knowledge, how it grows, 167.
LADD, 18.
Law, 'the' 240; law as a scien-
tific concept, 180.
Laws of thought and of nature,
56.
Laymen in philosophy, 14.
LEIBNITZ, 23 f .
LESSING, 220.
Letter from member of audience,
268, 278.
Levels of thought compared, 188-
192.
306
INDEX
LOCKE, 90.
Logic, inductive, 55.
Lord's supper, 88.
LOTZE, 256.
MACH, 57.
McTAGGART, 118.
Many, the One and the, Lecture
IV; Many ness co-ordinate with
oneness, 138.
Materialism defined, 93.
Matter, Berkeley on, 89; Spencer
on its supposed crassness, 94;
vs. God, as a principle, 98-108.
Mechanism, 111.
Meliorism, 119, 127, 285 f.
Merit, 118.
Method, the pragmatic, 45, 51.
MILHAUD, 57.
Monism, 276; must be absolute,
159 f; religious, 292 f; con-
trasted with pluralism, 259. See
' unity.'
Monistic sentiment, 149 f, 159.
Mont-Pelee eruption, 113.
Moral holidays, 74.
Morbid minds, 291.
MYERS, 256.
Mysticism affirms unity, 151 f.
Names, 213.
Naturalism, 16.
New beliefs, their formation, 59.
Old truths, their part in forming
new truth, 60 f, 245; formed
out of still older truth, 65 f,
246 f.
One, the, and the Many, Lecture
IV.
Oneness, see 'unity.'
Optimism, 23, 29 f, 285.
OSTWALD, 48, 57.
Pantheism, 70.
PAPINI, 54, 79, 159, 257.
Past, reality of theTSWr—
PEARSON, 57.
PEIRCE, 46.
Personal identity, 90 f.
Pessimism, 285.
Philosophies, 38; their contrast
with reality, 21, 34; their short-
comings, 37.
Philosophy, characterized, 3 f,
38; its temperament, 51 f;
seeks variety as well as unity,
129; gives a world in two
editions, 61, 265 f ; professors
of, 33.
Pluralism, 160; noetic, 135, 166,
277; contrasted with monism,
259, 293.
POINCARE, 57.
Possibility, 282 f.
Pragmatic method, 45 f, 54.
Pragmatism, what it means, Lec-
ture II; as a method, 45 f ; as
a theory of truth, 55 ; as a medi-
ator, 33, 300 f ; its history, 47;
characterized, 51; its contrast
with rationalism, 68, 281; its
affinity with Science, 68; its
geniality, 80; looks towards
facts and the future, 122; fa-
vors pluralism, 156, 161, 296;
its critics, 233; its relations
with religion, Lecture VIII;
accused of tough-mindedness,
279; is melioristic, 286.
307
INDEX
Principles, rationalism leans on
them, 12, 52.
Promise, God, a term of, 102, 108;
design ditto, 115; free will
ditto, 120.
Protestantism, 123.
Punishment, 91, 116.
Rationalism, 9 f ; its refined uni-
verse, 21, 27; its temperament,
22, 67 f ; characterized, 51 f ;
its view of pragmatism, 233,
259 f ; its view of truth, see
'truth.'
Rationality, 288, 291.
Reality, defined, 212, 244; con-
crete, 30; its three parts, 244 f ;
hard to find raw, 249; theories
of, 250; accepts human addi-
tions, 251; which of its deter-
minations are the truer? 252;
ready made? or still making?
257; exists in distributive form,
264; its relation to desire, 289.
Refinement of rationalism's uni-
verse, 22.
Reflection, total, 127.
Religion and pragmatism, Lec-
ture VIII.
Religion, M. I. Swift on, 31; is
of two types, 17, 293 f, 300.
RICKERT, 228, 236.
ROYCE, 17, 29, 142, 146.
Salvation of world, 284.
SANTAYANA, 175.
SCHILLER, 57, 65 f, 75, 159, 233,
240 f, 249.
Sciences, their philosophy, 56,
185 f ; their utilty, 186 f.
SCHLAU, HANSCHEN, 220.
Selective activity of mind, 246 f.
Sensations, 246.
Sensationalism, 10.
Sentimentalist fallacy, 229.
Shoes, 111.
SlGWART, 57.
Single-word solutions of world-
enigma, 239.
SOLOMON, 52.
Space, a discovery, 174, 177.
SPENCER, characterized, 39; on
'matter,' 94; his 'unknow-
able,' 102.
Sphinx, 239.
Squirrel, 43.
Student's thesis, 21.
Substance, 85; material, 89; spir-
itual, 90; the category of, 184 f.
Summarizing reactions of our
mind, 35.
SWIFT, 28.
Systematic union of things, 136.
TAYLOR, 227, 244.
Temperament, in philosophy, 7,
51.
Tender-mindedness, 12 f, 263;
in religion, 295 f .
Theism, 17, 70, 103.
Theories, as instruments, 53, 194.
Thesis, my student's, 21.
'Thing,' a common-sense cate-
gory, 178, 183 f ; its ambiguity,
253.
Time, a discovery, 174, 177, 183.
Tough-mindedness, 12 f, 263.
Transcendental idealism, 19.
True, a species of good, 76; means
expedient thinking, 222.
308
INDEX
Truth, pragmatic view of, Lec-
ture VI; Schiller and Dewey
on, 58; its definition, 198; in-
tellectualist view of, 200, 218,
226; as the Truth, 239; prag-
matically it means verifiabil-
ity, 201; its utility, 203; its
function of 'leading,' 205 f; is
what works, 213 f ; is made,
224; rationalist definitions of,
227; their weakness, 230 f;
must be concretely discussed,
231.
Truths may clash, 78; eternal,
209. See 'old truths.'
Ultimate, the, vs. the Absolute,
159, 165.
Unification vs. unity, 280.
Unity of things, Lecture IV, pas-
sim; not philosophy's sole
quest, 129 f; pragmatic study
of, 132, 148, 155; of system,
136; of origin, 138; generic,
139; of purpose, 140; esthetic,
143; noetic, 145; affirmed by
Hindu philosophy, 151; vari-
ous grades of, 156; absolute,
160.
Universe of discourse, 133.
Unknowable, the, 102.
Usefulness, of truth, 202; of ab-
stract concepts, 128, 150, 172,
210, 265; of Absolute, 75 f.
Vedanta, 151.
Verification defined, 201; vs.
verifiability, 207; means lead-
ing, 215.
Vestigial peculiarities, 169.
Vision designed, 109.
VIVEKANDA, 151 f.
Wafer, 88.
Wealth, 220.
Weather, 174.
Westminster Abbey, 39.
WHITMAN, 35, 274.
Woodpecker, 110.
Words, in philosophy, 52.
World, two editions of, 259, 264,
Worth, of God, 97.
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